My Day with Microsoft

Last Saturday, when the weather outside was a balmy (for this time of year) 52 degrees, I spent my day with Microsoft.

Not out in Redmond. Not chatting with Bill or Steve.

Simply trying (mostly in vain) to apply a security patch to my Windows XP o/s.

To be fair, this PC lives in our upstairs loft. Primarily, it's used by my better half, for email and web browsing. Recently it was running very slowly and she asked me to take a look at it.

First thing I noticed was that the security updates were lagging and so I upgraded Silverlight and visited the Security download site. So far so good. Began downloading service pack 3 (fine), then the install began. After taking inventory and backing up files and checking registry keys, the install proceeded along for about 20 minutes and then suddenly aborted with the error message "Access Denied".

Twenty minutes later, the install had reversed itself and I had to restart the computer. This was a routine I would become very familiar with as the day wore on.

Found Microsoft help, tested to make sure I had admin rights. Tried again. Access Denied.
Disabled anti-virus. Tried again. Access Denied.
Ran utilities to clean registry, scan and remove adware and viruses. Tried again. Access Denied.
Found a registry hack on Google. Tried again. Started looking at Mac ads. Access Denied.
Finally found a more comprehensive blog. Copied down a command, created a reset.cmd file and executed that. It basically swept all memory. making sure all locks were removed.
Tried again. Success!

Well, THAT only took 8 hours.

And I have 5 more updates to go.

Ran outside quickly to experience the warm weather seconds before the sun set. I bet it was a glorious day.