Sunday, September 03, 2006

Thawing an XP System - Update

Dad called me this afternoon.

His pc is still running great. He was so impressed with Sunblet Software's Kerio Personal Firewall that he decided to pony-up and buy a full license. See how the "give it away for free" model works? Three cheers for Kerio!

He is also impressed with Grisoft's AVG-Free anti-virus program. He hasn't decided about buying that one yet.

Jim Thompson gently asked me in the post comments if I had checked the process-thread priority for the Windows updater. I didn't. (Doh!)

I responded that my XP system has that process set to "Normal" but I really should have checked that out as well when I had Dad's system, anyway....

Dad tells me that today he ran Windows Update manually like I showed him, and eventually it returned a bazillion or so critical updates to install. So it was working. However, he also mentioned (and I remembered) that when my brother helped Dad upgrade from ME to XP, they ran into the same problem, the system didn't seem to retain the update catalog (or) wasn't actually installing the updates at all to begin with.

Thus my response comment to Jim looks more plausible, that the Windows Updater (and/or Updates catalog on his system) is corrupted. He'll have to bring it back down for me to repair that.

In the meantime, the workaround of disabling Automatic Updates is keeping his system responsive after boot and avoiding the freeze-ups.

FYI,
--Claus

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