- Joined
- Oct 29, 2008
- Messages
- 2,417
Hey, I've been acting as tech support for a friend of mine and she's recently gotten into a ridiculously huge problem. She's running Vista 32-bit on a boxed Dell laptop and Windows will either crash on startup or configure updates for 12+ hours with no progress. He's the sequence of events that I saw.
1. Turned on computer and at log-in screen got error message "Windows could not find specified file." Computer restarts itself, rinse repeat.
To fix this, I tried safe mode, which did not work (zomg). Luckily she has the Windows install disc, so I booted tried the "Repair Startup Processes". This seemed to work, once. When it happened again, I did a system restore do a week before the error happened and this seemed to fix ti. Then, I downloaded and installed the updates that happened in between that time. Everything was fine so I left.
2. Later that night, after she had shut down her computer, it started up in the middle of the night to auto-update. When she woke up, it was still "Configuring updates - Step 3 of 3 0%", it would restart itself try again for five minutes and restart. This lasted for 12 hours while she was at class.
I think now something is wrong with the update, but I'm not sure if either Windows is infected and rejecting the update or if the update itself is buggy. I tried turning off Automatic Updates but the option was greyed out (yes, the account is administrator).
I figure there's no way to keep it from updating, so I showed her how to pull the battery out of her laptop so it won't be able to. Put the battery back in and I get a solid black screen with BIOS-like text running a whole bunch of checks and processes. One process that pops up is something about repairing update systems.
Since something new happened, I went ahead and tried everything else again and I seem to be back at "Configuring updates" for 12 hours again. Any clue what could cause this and how to fix it? Right now, I'm tempted to just shell it back to Dell and tell them to send a new one.
1. Turned on computer and at log-in screen got error message "Windows could not find specified file." Computer restarts itself, rinse repeat.
To fix this, I tried safe mode, which did not work (zomg). Luckily she has the Windows install disc, so I booted tried the "Repair Startup Processes". This seemed to work, once. When it happened again, I did a system restore do a week before the error happened and this seemed to fix ti. Then, I downloaded and installed the updates that happened in between that time. Everything was fine so I left.
2. Later that night, after she had shut down her computer, it started up in the middle of the night to auto-update. When she woke up, it was still "Configuring updates - Step 3 of 3 0%", it would restart itself try again for five minutes and restart. This lasted for 12 hours while she was at class.
I think now something is wrong with the update, but I'm not sure if either Windows is infected and rejecting the update or if the update itself is buggy. I tried turning off Automatic Updates but the option was greyed out (yes, the account is administrator).
I figure there's no way to keep it from updating, so I showed her how to pull the battery out of her laptop so it won't be able to. Put the battery back in and I get a solid black screen with BIOS-like text running a whole bunch of checks and processes. One process that pops up is something about repairing update systems.
Since something new happened, I went ahead and tried everything else again and I seem to be back at "Configuring updates" for 12 hours again. Any clue what could cause this and how to fix it? Right now, I'm tempted to just shell it back to Dell and tell them to send a new one.
