The return of my happy spirits coupled with the time elapsed since I thought up my XP update rant has led to a bit less enthusiasm for posting it. I had a few choice words in mind to describe the hell I went through. Since I no longer feel ranty, I’ll be brief.
My copy of XP is one I bought when I built my last computer two years ago: Windows XP Home Edition SP1. I’m going to convert my old box over to Linux, so decided to go ahead and keep using XP on the new one rather than shelling out for Vista (and honestly, I see nothing in Vista worth paying for that XP doesn’t already give me). The installation went off without a hitch. After getting the motherboard and graphics drivers installed, the first order of business was getting updated to SP2.
Naked Windows installs are vulnerable to all sorts of nastiness on the web. The older the install disk, the more vulnerable it’s going to be. The first thing I got hit by was messenger service spam. This particular instance was telling me that Windows had detected 55 critical system errors and that I needed to go to a particular website, then download and install some software to fix it. Harmless, but annoying.
On a side note, it’s amazing to me that there are people out there who are gullible enough to believe that sort of thing. I’m of the mind that if you are going to regularly use a computer you should at least understand enough about what’s going on so that you aren’t likely to fall for so obvious a scam. A great many people treat their computers as a black box that just does stuff. That makes it so much easier for the bad guys (the scammers/spammers/phishers and whatnot). If people would take just a little more interest in understanding more than how to click a mouse button, it would make the work of the bad guys that much harder and likely reduce their ROI by a nice margin.
The next problem came when trying to run Windows Update. The update would start, but kept freezing. The whole system would freeze. I couldn’t move the mouse, couldn’t bring up the task manger, nothing. A few reboots and different attempts ended with the same result, though the freeze happened at different points of the update process each time. I have since found a possible work around for this, though I didn’t look for one at the time.
Ultimately, I started over with a format of the hard drive and a fresh installation of Windows. This time, rather than go through the Windows Update site immediately I went round about by clicking links to get SP2. This ultimately led me to the Windows Update site, but this time I manually selected to install SP2. That worked. Then I updated Internet Explorer to the latest version (I’m a Firefox user, but still need IE for some things so I always keep it updated). Then I was able to run Windows Update successfully and get the things I need.
Looking back on what I’ve written, it sounds more like an annoyance than the hell I claim in the post title. I suppose that’s a side effect of the good mood I’m in now. At the time, I was a major PITA and wasted a couple of hours of my time. Initially, I wanted to post this as just to vent. But by now I’m just hoping that if anyone reading this has a similar problem, they can get some inspiration to fix it.
Once all of the critical updates were installed, I spent a day marveling at how nice some of the newer games I’ve bought look at the highest video settings and how much snappier everything is compared to the old box. The next day, I ran into a major video problem. But that’s another story.
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