Welcome to my nightmare

Saturday morning and I'm both at work and installing service pack 1 for xp. I know, I know, most everyone knows I went through hell a couple of weeks ago with service pack 1 but I finally got it to work with a lot of handholding from microsoft's tech support (and yes, I had to buy a new copy of xp's upgrade because they refused to support my OEM version -- those rat bastards), I got it running.

But there were problems. I think I screwed up in the very last reinstall (don't ask how many times I've reinstalled in the past month) and didn't install the drivers for my AGP port until AFTER I installed my video card stuff. I was getting all sorts of graphics card related errors and sometimes my system would completely reboot after taking a CD out. It was really really weird and really really annoying.

So last night, in my brilliance (note: spellchecker will be back with NEXT blog), I decided to reformat and start from scratch since I knew what to do. Well guess what? I didn't. This time I tried installing service pack 1 from the handy disk I ordered from Microsoft. Didn't work. Same problem. I applied the fix that Microsoft told me to do (from when I installed from the web), went to reinstall the service pack and ... didn't work fatal error.

You know, I know there's something wrong with my system. It's actually both systems I've had XP on. When you create your "admin" account it doesn't really make an admin account. It's some sort of quasi-admin account. There's an administrator account that you can get to in safe mode but that's only for safe mode and you can't really do anything with it. So I'm stuck with my main name and my main account and for some reason it doesn't have the permissions in the registry to a) let microsoft windows update do service pack 1 and b) let Norton system works run without some sort of brain surgery.

Now Stef tried to convince me to try a MAC last night. Honest to god, her heart is in the right place, but as much as I hate microsoft (and I really detest them right now), I don't like MACS. Never have, never will, and for the love of god, if I see one more swarmy "i-switched" commercial (with the moronic "Apple converts" cluelessly dragging down the "cool" status of having a MAC by offering inane ramblings about how they were too brain dead to run a real computer), I'll probably just go completely bonkers then find Steve Jobs and punch him in the mouth.

But back to my windows problem. Right now I've reinstalled yet again and I'm applying service pack 1 from the web just to have it fail. Then I'm going to reboot, apply the little patch they said to do (it's a registry edit), reboot, sign back on and redownload the damn thing to see if it will work. If it doesn't I will scream so loudly that it will shake more rafters than the screams that came out of Bill Gates when he gave birth to this god awful creation we know as windows XP.

THEN I'll start on Norton. Peter Norton needs to be punched in the mouth. This year's system works has the exact same registry problems as last year's version except they call it something else and their tech support has no clue about it. I got system works to work by doing the exact same registry edit as I did last year with that god awful version of the software. I didn't bother telling Norton's tech support about what I did because I want everyone else in my situation to suffer as much as I currently am.

I'm a cold heartless bastard in the morning, aren't I?

Back to my install of service pack 1. So far I've downloaded the 40 or a million megs it wanted me to dl and I'm in the process of creating a restore point and backing up files. It will then take five minutes to install the new updates then update the registry, get access is denied, then give me the option of taking everything off and going back to my old files. I'll say "sure thing, Mr. Gates, I'd love to!" and take them off, do this registry hack, and try this whole process again.

Sometimes I wish for the lobotomy and the MAC. I really do.

In other news, I passed up a chance to join the lovely Laura Burstein in NYC for a weekend last week. I could have gone, however, I really don't like NYC. I know she had a great time (you can read her adventures at http://www.leoville.com/laura), but if I had gone with her we would have been mugged 3 times, had our taxi hijacked by crack smoking nuns, and fought the whole time since I still don't have any trendy clothes and I look like Mr. Roper (especially now that I'm letting my hair grow and it's coming back GRAY!).

You can see for yourself once I get my webcam back up. I'll be webcam whoring as I work this afternoon so you can see me losing my mind live on the Internet.

With that, I'm back to the drawing board. I'm using it to pound virtual spikes into my heart. Lovely! :)

k9

Uh ...

In the words of Gilda Radner's SNL character Emily Litella, "Nevermind."

It seems that in the past couple of weeks Microsoft has changed the internet update patch for service pack 1. Instead of getting to the point of changing my registry and dying, this time, oh this time ... well it worked. It confused the hell out of me but it worked.

Could it be that by interacting with Tech Support they actually FIXED THE PROBLEM?? Oh dear god. My world is shattered. Here I wanted to hate Microsoft all day and be pissed off and blame them for my troubles when THIS TIME THEY ACTUALLY FIXED A PROBLEM!

I'm so confused.

So I'm going to apologize. Microsoft isn't totally evil. MACS, however, are made of flaming disease that spreads the flames of evil to the earth with every new i-switched commercial. The jury is still out on Norton. I'm trying that nightmare when I get home from wal-mart later.

Installing soundblaster drivers now. Joy. :)

k9

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