Help with a small Policeman

[Bluepete]

Yes, that's right, a small PC - Mrs BP's laptop!

No, this isn't supposed to be in the comedy thread.

Our Dell laptop is stuck in phase 3 of windows update. It sits at 0% for a while then restarts. We've tried restarts, battery out, Ctrl-alt-delete, nothing happens.

If we start it in safe mode, it just does the same thing. We just can't get it out of the loop.

What do we do?

Reasonable answers for a man who isn't tech savvy. No "install such and such an operating system" please tell me howto get the thing working.

Cheers,

Pete ;)

[fizzwheel]

What Operating System ?

[DJ123]

on the restart can you enter the setup menu, sually by pressing F11 i think. On my Acer, by doing this i can reset the laptop to the last restored/back up point. I am sure Dell have a similar system

[fizzwheel]

Pete, if its Windows 7

Boot it and hit F8 like you've been doing to get the menu up where it gives you the "Safe Mode" options, scroll a bit further down that menu and it'll say something like :

"Boot in last known good configuration"

Let it do that it should boot up. What you'll then need to do is either

Turn off Windows Updates completely and take the risk that you miss an update and it exposes you to the Pox or a Virus.

or

Turn Windows updates on and then download / install them one by one till you've worked out which one it is thats causing the problem.

I'd try that route first before I started reinstalling from scratch.

[munkygunn182]

+1 on what Fizzwheel is saying,

I had a similar occurance. Went through each update one by one and found the problematic one, re-downloaded it and it installed no problem, so maybe just a corrupted download?

[andrewsmith]

Pete, if its Windows 7

Boot it and hit F8 like you've been doing to get the menu up where it gives you the "Safe Mode" options, scroll a bit further down that menu and it'll say something like :

"Boot in last known good configuration"

Let it do that it should boot up. What you'll then need to do is either

Turn off Windows Updates completely and take the risk that you miss an update and it exposes you to the Pox or a Virus.

or

Turn Windows updates on and then download / install them one by one till you've worked out which one it is thats causing the problem.

I'd try that route first before I started reinstalling from scratch.

+1

Vista is the same process if it isn't on 7.
Has anyone worked out what causes these screw ups as I had a few on XP many moon ago

[Bluepete]

Nope, that didn't work.

It's Vista, but it came right back with the update screen

Pete ;)

[maviczap]

Upgrade to Windows 7 ?

[andrewsmith]

Downgrade to XP?

[maviczap]

Downgrade to XP?

7 is supposed to be a variant of XP isn't it?

Both are good in my books

Buy a new laptop Pete, pretty cheap these days, although you'll want the data off the old one won't you?

[Stuuk1]

New laptop?! Just get a copy of windows 7 and boot from disk!

Windows 7 is 1000x better that vista, you wouldn't regret it!


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Member of the 1 litre club...

[Seggons]

Out of interest have you left it going through the cycle of start-up > Windows Update > Reboot for a period of time? The only reason I ask is because my Grandad's had the same issue. Eventually, despite looking like it was doing the same thing over and over it did finally enter Windows after about 3 or 4 cycles and said that the update had failed. I didn't have the time to figure out which update it was so I just turned Windows Update off.

[fizzwheel]

Pete a quick google reveals that this might work

1. Insert your Vista Media into your dirve and boot from it.
2. Select "Repair your Computer" from the list.
3. Select "Command Prompt" from the recovery choices.
4. At the command prompt change your directory to C:WindowsWinSxS
5. Type: del pending.xml
6. Exit and reboot

As long as you have your Vista disk ?

If not skip step 1 and then just F8 boot it and choose repair your computer and then follow the rest of the steps, It might work it might not.

edit - this is what you need to do.

do the above and when you get to step 4 type in this, type in each line at the cmd prompt and press return when you get to the end of the text... i.e.

type C: then press return key, then type cd windows then press return key...

C:
cd Windows
cd WinSXS
del pending.xml

Bit early IMHO to be looking at upgrading the OS just yet. Personally I'd not go back to XP, IMHE Windows 7 is superior as long as you have enough grunt to run it...

[Bibio]

have you plugged the laptop into the charger?

[454697819]

I had something similar on two machines running 7, it was SP1 which killed both machines dead, I had to re install windows, I hope that is not the case and that it sorts itself out.

[Quiff Wichard]

I can get u a new laptop Pete off a bloke I kno in a pub , cash no receipt. ... Interested ?


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