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Issue #365: Jul 20–26, 2014

Q: HELP, Bill Gates has me prisoner~!!! The other day my ‘puter did it’s usual Windows Seven Update and downloaded a bunch of stuff Bill thinks I need. When I finished with the ‘puter I did the shut-down procedure and the advisory came up that it was downloading and would turn itself off. Fine, so I went to bed. The next day when I turned the ‘puter on, the advisory came up that it was applying the updates. Then it proceeded to the “configuring windows” advisory but at the end of the process an advisory came up saying that the configuration had failed and the ‘puter was “reverting” to the configuration prior to the change. Now this happens EVERY TIME I turn the unit on. (1) applying the changes, (2) configuring Windows, (3) Failure and reverting. So what can I do now? Something is wrong, but I don’t know what. I looked at Windows Updates and I’m current. I cannot find the list of downloaded updates to delete them. My puny computer knowledge and ability is inadequate. I’m sitting here like a deer in the headlights, watching the application, the configuration, and the failure. HELP~!!

– Wayne T.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: My goodness that’s not good! I doubt very much that Mr. Gates is off in a corner office in a high tower somewhere wringing his hands and saying “Mwah-ha-ha-haaaa!” as he monitors your futile attempts to get your system working again. Just in case he is, however, we’d better get you back online. That’ll show him!

The first thing I’d recommend is booting your system in Safe Mode. To do that, hit [F8] after the BIOS displays its power-on self-test information, but before the Windows logo appears. If you see the Windows startup, you missed the narrow period during which you can do this. If you succeed, you’ll get a menu, and one of the options will be to boot into “Safe mode with network support”. Choose that, and your system will come up, but the boot will probably take longer than you’re used to. You’ll be able to tell you’re in Safe Mode because the system will tell you with a dialog box, and the words “Safe Mode” will appear in each corner of the Windows desktop.

If you can get that far (and you should) you have a few options for the path you take. Depending on your results, you might need to reboot in Safe mode and take another path.

Path #1: Disable auto-reboot. I’m not sure whether this will do anything for you or not, since it doesn’t sound like the system is actually crashing. But if it is, Windows is set by default to automatically reboot. This step involves getting into the Windows registry, which is a dangerous place to be poking around. So take extreme care while in the editor! To enable or disable auto-reboot, run the Registry Editor by hitting the key combination [WinKey]+R, then type regedit and click OK. In the tree on the left, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Control/CrashControl. Under this key you should see a value named AutoReboot. Double-click it, and set its value to 0. Click OK, and close the Registry Editor. To re-enable it, set it to 1.

Path #2: Restore your computer to a point before the problem started. For instructions on how to do this, I’m going to refer you to this article: tinyurl.com/67tvkdq.

Path #3: Take another look at Windows Update. You can click “View update history” in the navigation panel to see a sorted list of updates. This should allow you to see what updates were installed when the problem started. Also of interest on this page is a hyperlink that says “Troubleshoot problems with installing updates”. It’s also possible that installing the update while in Safe Mode might succeed where it failed before.

Path #4: If you can’t install via Windows Update, see if Microsoft has the update available as a stand-alone download. If so, try installing it by right-clicking the downloaded file and selecting “Run as Administrator…”. This elevates the privileges of the program, which might overcome the problem.

While these suggestions are certainly not exhaustive, they are some of the most-likely potential fixes to your problem. If you’d like to discuss it further, feel free to hit my website, and comment on this week’s article. I’d love to hear when you find your fix.


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