Strange

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I looked at a PC for a friend yesturday just as a general "tune up".
(XP home machine)

I noticed that the automatic updates were set to retrieve and download as and when. Good idea. The problem is that there are updates needed that won't update.

When asking he said "oh, is that the yellow thing at the bottom of the screen?". He meant the exclamation mark warning there were new updates. Yes, I said.

Because he is on dial up he frequently boots his computer, checks his e-mail and then shuts the internet connection off.
I think this has screwed the update process.

I tried a scandisk, de-frag and several re-starts and then another 2 attempts later they still failed.
At the run command I types SFC. This did nothing?
I booted to the CD and selected to repair the current installation using the Windows CD Rom. It asks you for the administers password which we typed in and it said it was wrong!
After 3 attempts it asks you to re-boot which we did. We typed the same password in to the only administer account and it logged in successfuly

My friend is all up for a re-install but surely there is a way around this corrupted update process???

 

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Hi,

I went to the Microsoft download site downloaded the missing patches and installed them manually and all is well!

I put it down to the fact that he might of disconnected the net connection half way through and screwed it up?

 

I've never experienced that... both my laptop and desktop connect, at home, via a slow dial-up so I regularly have updates downloading in the background and disconnecting in the middle (unless I've remembered to download them at work!). So far I've never had a problem but your theory does make sound sense as a strong possibility.

 

Hi Keith,

To be honest that is all I can put it down to

After manually installing them it was fine. I went back to Update and there were no updates to update

 

I'm just wondering if the Automatic Updates is now corrupt and won't update next month... I bet you won't be too happy manually installing updates every month :hhhmmm

 

Oh, Blimey I hope not!

 

Maybe you can teach this person how to connect to the Internet via dial up, open IE, click Tools, click Windows Update and when the Windows Update page comes up, click Express. Should be pretty automatic after that and he doesn't have to worry about the download disconnecting halfway through.

Also on dial up, I really am leery of a program having the ability to dial up a connection without my knowledge. I'd rather *know* when my computer is reaching out and downloading software. Of course, for the typical end user, having the machine going through this process automatically makes it a lot easier.

 

good point trip.
On leaving I set it to Custom so hopefully on the next round of updates it will sort itself out!