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.

Word has just eaten my files @#!

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Aaagh! I’m in the middle of a computer nightmare. Coming in this morning to continue working on a couple of Word files everything looked just as I had left them the night before until I realised that all the work I had done on them yesterday had completely disappeared! It was like groundhog day, but with considerably more aggravation and swearing. (more…)

Oi. Microsoft. Where’s my XP SP3?

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

It’s been a good couple of weeks since Microsoft started pushing out XP Service Pack 3 through Automatic Update, yet I’m still to see hide nor hair of the blighter.

I’ve got Automatic Update turned on and other patches are coming down the pipe with depressing regularity, but not the big boy.

I’ve headed off to Windows Update to see if I can manually tempt the swine on to my system, but the site seems oblivious to XP SP3’s very existence. I’m being offered Office Comaptbility Pack Service Pack 1 (packs for packs? Give me strength), an update for Outlook 2007 and the first Service Pack for Office 2008 Accounting, but not a sniff of the final Service Pack for the most popular operating system in the company’s history.

(more…)