Windows XP SP3

I tried to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 on our (only) Windows PC today¹. This was a mistake.

Having installed it and re-booted it just kept re-booting. When I did a quick Google I rapidly discovered reports of this all over the Web (including this story in The Register which I really should have spotted on Friday).

Despite what that story says about it being an AMD related problem I experienced the same issues with a Celeron. Anyway after some research I managed to get it to boot in "Safe Mode" and removed SP3 and ... thank goodness ... the machine came back to life again.

What was annoying is that the machine's on a KVM so while I'm waiting for paint to dry watching it uninstall SP3 I couldn't get on with anything else as it was hogging my keyboard, mouse and one screen.

So that's another couple of hours out of my life that Bill owes me.

The underlying issue remains, but I'll leave it a month or two before I try again: they might have a working released of SP3 by then!

Despite being a Linux household we've got one Windows PC as there is some software which doesn't run well under Wine (and I've never got round to installing VMWare again on any of our PCs).

Tags: Microsoft

Written 12/05/08

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On 12/09/08 at 11:10am Paul wrote:

A posting on CIX yesterday lead me to this blog posting which implicated wireless LAN cards using the ADMtek ADM8211 chipset as a possible culprit. The PC had an unused wireless LAN card in it from an early attempt to locate it somewhere our WAP didn't reach so I removed it, reinstalled SP3 and it all went through smoothly this time. Phew!

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