Over the weekend I visited my sister, and as per usual I got to do Family Tech Support. "You don't mind this, do you?" I gave her that look. "Are you kidding? I enjoy this." She needed Service Pack 2, so I did that along with a bunch of other updates, installed FoxIt PDF reader and CCleaner, and did some other updates and housekeeping. No problemo.

Back at home, I decided to finally do the same to our desktop. Tired of those SP2 nags. (Really, I've been putting it off for a long while.) All went well at first. In fact, installing SP2 and attendant updates takes just about the same amount of time as the Oscars telecast. (By the way, if you thought that you were left out of the Oscar Party invite list this year, we didn't have one, so you weren't left out, OK?)

But the next day, for some reason, the screen reverted to a color depth of 4, count them 4, bits. Tried the System Restore and somehow got caught in an infinite Cannot Boot Loop.

You know, there's never anything fun about doing an XP Re-Installation. Trust me, I've done it plenty of times. You know what they should do? Have a game. Instead of marketspeak "Here's what Windows can do for you now!" on the screen (while you watch the progress go s l o w l y from 22% to 23%) they should imbed some kind of game into the installation. Nothing fancy, I mean heck, Minesweeper must take up a few hundred K?

As it was, I caught up on some very important comic book reading instead.

M E-L posted this on February 27, 2007
It is filed under Computers & Internet

It is also indexed with the following tags: Microsoft | Rants |