service pack 2

[Gibson]

Fellow Activians can you help me. I downloaded and installed the new service pack 2 from microsoft, everything was going fine, my computer rbooted after installing and it continued to reboot as soon as it got the the welcome screen...i though maybe a download error so i waited for the service pack to come out on disk...�6.99 later and here we are again the same thing happens... I have an Avent 64 3200, a cool 1 gig of memory and hard drive space to die for, can anyone help with this problem...i have let the computer reboot like this for 30 minutes just incase it is part of the process but nothing...

[QPR]

This website is full of useful solutions, bit pricy though: http://www.apple.com

[j2buttonsw]

I sp-2'd two XP machines both with same result: they never booted again, not safe mode not nothing. I used the XP repair option on the CD to patch up one and rebuilt the other from scratch. Interestingly, the rebuild one I sp-2'd and it was fine. SP-2 is a buggy patch that Microsoft should not have released.

[dodgyshirt]

j2buttonsw and I have agreed on previous posts regarding SP2. You can have the best Pc in the world and there is no guarantee that it will install SP2 faultlessly. Even if you do manage to install it, be prepared for compatability problems with some programmes, even common ones such as Nero 6. I have installed it on 6 PCs so far and cannot honestly say that I am 100% satisfied with any of them. `A Service Pack too far.' I fear.

[zaniac]

This too happened to me and after many hours of Googling came up with this solution, by the way this only seems to affect people with newer processors ie AMD 64 and Intel Prescott something to do with the motherboard bios not updating the processor microcode correctly anyway back to the plot. For those of you who have already installed SP2 and getting the endless welcome screen this trick seems to work,reset your computer and enter the bios setup (most systems its pressing the Delete key others you may find in your system documentation)next disable the processor level 1 and level 2 cache. Save settings and reboot.This slows the system down terriby but it is the only way. Next uninstall SP2 but be prepared for a lengthy wait.Once you are back to pre-SP2 state follow this procedure(and for those about install SP2 and think they may be affected follow from here. Navigate to the system32\drivers\ directory in your windows folder next copy the file update.sys to a location where it won't be overwritten and where you can easily find it, next (re)install SP2 you may have to go back to the Windows Update site to start the setup procedure don't worry if you have already downloaded it it will only run the setup procedure.Once SP2 has installed it will prompt you to reboot. DO NOT REBOOT at this stage, click cancel and then copy the update.sys file back to your windows\system32\drivers\ directory overwriting the file already there once this is done then reboot and all should be well. If you are wary of overwriting files just rename the update.sys file before copying the original back

[ralphm]

hmmm, I have just installed sp2 on my FAST Alactritas 520-K8 which runs an AMD Athlon 64 processor and while it does boot (slowly now) into windows XP Pro I can't get it to shut down! When I check task manager after asking it to shutdown there is "sysfade.exe" (I think...) not responding... VERY annoying. I'm going to have to uninstall. I did install from a CD that came with a magazine si I guess that could have had bugs.

[stoo_pid]

Might also be worth looking here: http://www.annoyances.org/

[dodgyshirt]

Despite your lengthy but well-founded advice ZANIAC, it still does not alter the fact that SP2 is incompatible with a lot of programmes such as Nero 6.probably the most widely used CD Writing software available. Microsoft themselves list over 50 such programmes. I stand by my previous assertion.