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• Category: IT Blogging
• Current Mood: >_< Annoyed

In the past, many computers went down to the install of XP SP2 forcing many people to reformat their hard drives and start from scratch. Do you think Microsoft would have learned from this situation and not have another occurrence with Service Pack 3? Nope.

It started Memorial weekend when my grandfather just asked me to update his computer. I saw that the only update was Service Pack 3 for XP. It went through the first part of the install and then attempted to restart. Only to error out with the horrifying blue screen of death just after the XP splash screen.

I couldn't believe that this is happening again, but at least this time I was armed with the knowledge of the XP repair features. I ran a chkdsk on the drive. After watching the percentage go from 25 to 50 to 75 to 50... well, when it finally completed I attempted to restart and resulted in failure. SOB.

So I got out the trusty HP recovery discs. HP unfortunately does not include a recovery disc with their PCs like EVERY OTHER computer company and forces you to create your own. Lazy cheap bastards they are!

I threw the HP recovery discs in and booted to the HP recovery tools. This is nice since I am use to the Microsoft repair utilities. I ran the HP recovery process which reloaded the system files and program files. Attempted to reboot the PC and success!

Now the PC was back up and running, but unfortunately not as it was before it was taken down by its creator. Norton was reinstalled from the HP recovery. Simple enough, I uninstalled that piece of shit and reinstalled Avast. Office was completely destroyed which wasn't a problem either. Just a reinstall fixed that issue. XP also hung on the welcome screen, but that's nothing a little Ccleaner couldn't handle.

So now the final thing was to install the Windows updates. All expect for Service Pack 3 that is ;)