10 f.....g hours

10 Hours it took me., 10 HOURS. I'm sure my MAC/Linux owning friends will laugh, but that's the time it's taken me to restore the Windows OS on a computer ... 10 HOURS.

We had a series of power cuts one night. By the time it had finished I couldn't power up my old computer .. it would start up, and then flash a blue screen of information for half a second at me before restarting. Not being a superhero I couldn't quite catch the fault so after a few reboots and trying various things I decided to repair the system, which meant taking it back to its original XP base (it's an OLD computer) and then bringing it up to date with the latest security patches.

I started at 9pm

I finished at 7am.

The original XP base was, I think, 2001 .. that's the date on one of the files. I was doing a repair, not a rebuild, which was part of my mistake. The first attempt at repair failed as there was a corrupted database (Secedit.sdb) that needed to be rebuilt before certain dll's could be copied. Once that was done the repair worked and I was able to start up OK. No auto reboots.

So .. I had an original XP system that was about 8 years old. Slightly vulnerable to all the hacking that had gone on in those 8 years. Now I needed to patch it. MS in its wisdom does not allow home users to get a copy of the latest service patch (XP is at SP3) and apply it. They allow businesses to do this, but not home users. So, you have to connect the ***** to the internet and run windows update, which asks you if you want to apply SP2.

No. I want to apply service pack 3, but that apparently is a bridge too far so I have to apply SP2. I do so.

The computer failed to boot. The blue screen informs me I have error A0. A bit of digging suggested that there was a driver that had got problems

After some swearing I realised I had replaced the original keyboard with a USB version. Reverting to the old serial one fixed the problem.

Lucky I was still jetlagged. It was now the early hours of the morning and Windows was just getting into its stride. "Isn't it nice that we can spend some quality time together?", it asked. I swore at it.

So .. SP2 installed, now for SP3. Windows update asked me if I'd like to install SP3

I said yes

So I download it, apply it and it tells you that it wasn't able to install.

I swore very slightly. .... So I tell it to apply all patches to SP2

It gleefully tells you that there are 91 patches and would I like to apply them and it would only take 1 hour.

That is 1 hour to download

Then it installs them

Slowly.

I didn't want to leave the system because I KNEW that half way through it would maliciously have a dialogue box asking me if I wanted to do some inane and pointless exercise.

I was right ... half way through it politely asked "Would you like to install IE7 yes/no?"

*Sigh* .. YES

It installed IE7, then tried to install security patches for IE6, looked at me and decided that wouldn't be a good idea and passed up on that although it did tell me that it was sorry it hadn't been able to apply IE6 security patches .. I could almost hear it sniffing.

At 6 am it finished .. I rebooted, then was asked if i wanted to install SP3.

I said yes warily.

At 7am it announced I had a nice healthy computer, wasn't that fun and would I like to start again. (I'm making that last bit up)

I went to bed.