NOT! I've spent the last week trying to ressurect my sister's computer (Compaq Presario manufactured by HP). It had crashed on her and she couldn't get it to boot.
I managed to rescue her data from the hard-drive. While I had the hard-drive out, I gave the inside of the case a thorough cleaning. Put the hard-drive back in & tried to do a system restore to return the operating system, Vista Home Basic, to Out Of The Box condition. The diagnostics included with the system restore passed the hard-drive, motherboard & CPU, but failed the memory. I replaced the memory. I've also run diagnostics of my own - 20+ passes of Memtest86+ on the new memory & Spinright 6.0 on the hard-drive. It takes about 24 hours for each of those to run to completion, so that's 2 days right there. Both diagnostis completed without finding any errors. Still, the computer kept crashing when I tried to run Windows Update. I finally overcame that by booting into Safe Mode and running the Norton Removal Tool. After that I was able to run Windows Update from the Control Panel and install updates 2 & 3 at a time. Running it from the taskbar crashed the computer again. I've spent 5 days downloading & installing updates, rebooting and downloading & installing updates again. I got down to one last update that wouldn't install, and according to Microsoft support (via Google) I needed to install Service Pack 2. Looking at the requirements for Service Pack 2, I have to have Service Pack 1 installed in order to install Service Pack 2. Service Pack 1 installation failed. It gave an error code, but before I could write it down it flashed to a BSOD, which also shut down & rebooted before I could write down the error number. It wasn't one I'd seen before. And now, it won't start again. I get a BSOD & reboot OR a black screen & reboot OR it gets to the logon screen & goes black/BSOD when I enter the password. I can't even get into Safe Mode. Safe Mode with Networking goes black & reboots as soon as the last driver loads; Safe Mode without networking BSODs & reboots ... in either case it doesn't pause long enough for me to write the Stop Code down. Thank you for listening. I don't feel any better, but at least I've been able to vent. -- Science - Questions we may never find answers for. Religion - Answers we must never question. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
