Help with a small Policeman
 

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 ;)

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

What Operating System ?

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

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

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

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.

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

+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?

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

+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

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

Nope, that didn't work.

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

Pete ;)

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

Upgrade to Windows 7 ?

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

Downgrade to XP?

Re: Help with a small Policeman
 

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?