curmudgeonly compaq doesn't want to evolve

December 5, 2005 4:26 AM

My laptop is a Compaq that came from ebayland. The fella who sold it to me had 'lightly' used it, and he sent it to me with the drive wiped and XP SP 1 installed. Yet it refuses to install SP 2 or any other update. [+]

I do get the happy little globe with the 'updates are ready to install' and I've tried only installing one at a time and all kinds of ways to install. I'll always end up with a 'updates were unable to be installed, and your computer is in an unstable state,' type warnings, yet other than being a little slow for its age, it operates fine. Could it be related to this (which I can't quite grok how that works anyway)? Anyone else have a similar problem?

posted by moonbird to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Are you using broadband? My BF had a machine like that, and the problem turned out to be a too-small MTU setting in the registry. Though I must implore you not to edit your registry without backing up your data, and warn you that changes to your registry may cause your system to become unstable, this problem is really easy to fix by adding a registry key. Good luck!
posted by headspace at 4:43 AM on December 5, 2005

Have you tried going to the Windows Update site with a browser? If updates fail to install, the error message should be more informative about why.
posted by Malor at 4:48 AM on December 5, 2005

Best answer: Format, reinstall XP.
posted by Jairus at 5:44 AM on December 5, 2005

I would never trust what someone else had previously installed, go with Jairus's suggestion - wipe it clean, start from scratch.
posted by jkaczor at 6:45 AM on December 5, 2005

Best answer: Nuke it from orbit, reinstall, consider Linux.

I tend to believe in absolutes when it comes to computer security. For instance, you should always reinstall the OS when you come into the possession of a used machine.

For instance, your machine may be rootkitted or laden with spyware designed to report your information back to the seller. That's a nice little business model - sell rootkitted machine at a slight loss, reap personal information from all the takers.
posted by unixrat at 6:48 AM on December 5, 2005

I had heard that some pirated Windows copies would install SP1 but not SP2 (this may or may not be true). If you don't have the actual install disk, I'd suspect this may be the case. Get a copy of Windows you know is not pirated and go from there. If you do have the actual install CD, then wipe and re-install. If possible get a copy of the full SP2 administrative install and burn it to a CD first, so that after reinstalling Sp1 you cna do the SP2 update immediately, before you do anything else, and before you plug the laptop into the network.

If that is cost-prohibitive, well, as unixrat says there's always Linux.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:10 AM on December 5, 2005

Response by poster: Hey, thanks everyone! It really seems that starting from fresh is the best answer, and I really haven't invested all that much software in it. Here's a followup: when I reinstall, does it matter whether I use the Compaq OS disks or my own copy of Windows?
posted by moonbird at 7:27 AM on December 5, 2005

You may have a nasty little problem there. Tell me, are there two partitions on the HD?
posted by IronLizard at 7:59 AM on December 5, 2005

I'm not certain whether or not they still do it, but compaq had a habit of placing your re-install information on a seperate partition on the HD. The actual install disks were useless, except to trigger the re-inatallation process. You might want to check this out before re-formatting (or just use the compaq disks and skip that, extraneous, step alltogether).
posted by IronLizard at 8:05 AM on December 5, 2005

Response by poster: No partition that I can see, IronLizard.
posted by moonbird at 8:11 AM on December 5, 2005