Windows Updates freezing PCs?

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

This week’s Windows Updates appear to be causing more than their fair share of problems, including here in the PC Pro office.

News editor Nicole Kobie spent the best part of an hour swearing at her PC this morning, when it got stuck in a reboot cycle after installing the latest updates. She had to restore her PC to the last known working configuration to coax her system out of its coma.

It seems she’s not the only one. A quick survey of PC Pro’s followers on Twitter shows that several readers are experiencing similar issues.

“The updates appear to install, then during the restart, the laptop freezes during the power down phase and locks up,” reports one.

“A friend of mine’s computer is hanging during the updates. Happens after a reboot too,” reports another.

The Microsoft press office is checking to see whether there are any known issues, and we’ll update you as soon as we can.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already installed the updates, you might want to hold fire.

Why my desktop is like a space station and other assorted thoughts

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Way back in 2001 I set off for university armed only with a rudimentary grasp of the object-orientated programming model and my trusty desktop computer. Actually, that’s a slight misnomer; my PC at the time was a reclaimed, bright blue server case that stood nearly as tall as me.

It weighed an absolute ton, and virtually no desk could support it. Inside were 4 or 5 hard disks, of random size and origin, a bizarre selection of scrounged components and enough fans to build a quite effective hovercraft, all linked to a controller that I’d built myself.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the most stable PC ever created. It fell over, a lot – very often because a screw had been worked loose by the vibration from all those fans and landed on a circuit board. In the halls of residence we used to hold regular movie nights, with media streamed all over the super-fast campus network. If the film stopped, I would have to run back to my room to find the offending screw, remove it and reboot. (more…)