ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: My Win 7 system recently began to hang when I attempt to load/install updates. Last night when I selected shutdown, it said it would shutdown after updating. Sounded good. It downloaded one of 8 updates and shutdown. This morning upon start up it showed the update processing before allowing me to log on. Then I started Windows Update and it announced it had 7 updates to process and then it seemed to hang. The disk activity light indicates intermittent flashes some longer than others but it seems to say it’s doing something. Any ideas would be appreciated. Additional info: Yesterday’s troubleshooting returned an error code of 0x80070002. I also asked it to run wu10.diagcab from download.microsoft.com but no success. Thanks.

– Tom D.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A:  It is a normal occurrence for Windows to need to do a restart when doing upgrades.  Some files can’t be changed while the system is operating because the Windows kernel is using them and has exclusive access.  The updater must work on these files either at shutdown (after the kernel releases them) or during startup (before the kernel allocates the files for exclusive use).  The length of time this process takes depends on several things, including how many files need to be updated, whether they need to be downloaded and unpacked during the installation process, and any dependencies that force a specific order in which the files must be updated.  While all this is going on, you will see the hard drive light accessing occasionally, sometimes only occasionally, and other times almost constantly.  There is no hard-and-fast rule that updates follow.  So, as far as what I’ve talked about to this point, your system is responding perfectly normally.

The error code you mentioned, however, is not normal.  Windows displays this code when some files that are needed for the update are missing.  And yes, this can happen even when the process of downloading the update and extracting the files completed without error.  The possible causes for this condition vary, of course, which means that the ways to fix it also vary.  Refer to TinyURL.com/IGTM-0488 for Microsoft’s support page for resolving this issue.  Pay no attention to the banner at the top about Support for Windows XP, as this page applies to many versions of Windows.  This page has instructions on clearing out temporary files which could be interfering with your update, and as a last resort, there is a link to the Windows Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool that will help you fix corruptions in the Windows Update system. 

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Geek Notes: URLs vs. e-mail – Depending on where you read It’s Geek To Me, you may see a tagline at the end of each column that says “To view additional content, comment on articles, or submit a question of your own, visit ItsGeekToMe.co (not .com)!”  I always thought that by saying to “visit” that it made it pretty clear that ItsGeekToMe.co is the URL of my website, yet I have received a couple of contacts recently from people complaining that they tried to e-mail me at that address, but their e-mail client refused to recognize it as a valid address. 

The key difference is the absence of the @ symbol (“at” sign).  All e-mails contain this symbol, which appears between the addressee’s name, and the name/domain that hosts the account.  Without the ‘@’, it’s simply not an e-mail address, so of course your e-mail client will reject it.  By the same token, if you were to put “Geek@ItsGeekToMe.co” into the address bar of your web browser, you’re not going to visit a website, because that is not a URL.  What is far likelier to happen is that your browser, left without a URL to go to, will do a search on the term, and bring up something like Bing, Google, or Yahoo!, with search results for “geek@ItsGeekToMe.co”.  Ironically, at least where this Geek is concerned, you will probably get a link placed very prominently in the search results.

In hope of avoiding this problem in the future, I’ve updated the tagline slightly to read “…visit my website at…”.  By the way, e-mail addresses, and that portion of a URL before the domain (.com, .net, .org, etc) are all case insensitive.