[Kraellin]

ok, i had to install service pack 2 for xp so that i could install my new software and hardware. after about four hours and many headaches and one restore point and a re-do, i got it installed. but, now my computer is slower than, well... me doing a photo restoration. i've been turning off services and msconfig startup stuff, but no real changes. i already had .net 1.1 installed prior to the update of xp. but, i'm at a bit of a loss here. my systray loads up fully, well, almost fully, in about 20 minutes. my network connection, the internet one, doesnt even show in systray now, though my speed still seems ok. applications load up very slowly. i turned off the windows firewall thing as i use zone alarm. i also disabled the microsoft protection center thing that was installed with sp2 also. but all of this still has little to no effect. i'm running xp home, plenty of ram (1 gig), lots of harddrive space, an intel celeron 1.7 ghz processor, avg anti-virus and only a couple of other small applications in the systray and startup configuration.

if anyone has any clues, i'd appreciate some help here.

craig

[mistermonday]

Hi Craig,
my experiences with service pack upgrades have resulted in new system components which conflict with older ones which for some reason do not get removed. Solutions were to usually wipe the partition clean and start with a fresh install. If y ou decide to try that, you might 1st want to image your system partition in case you run into problems and decide to do a complete restore of your current configuration. Good Luck, Regards, Murray

[Gary Richardson]

Try this page, may be an answer there.

http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/xpsp2.htm

[briarrose]

Craig--could you provide a list of the services that are currently running on your PC? Also, are you using Windows themes, or classic view? Under the System Properties/Advanced/Performance Settings/Visual Effects - do you have "adjust for best performance" chosen?

XP SP2 generally doesn't slow down your PC, although it does (sometimes) cause all sorts of nastiness if you have a problem installing it...and it does change many of your carefully set up customizations back to the (very resource intensive) XP defaults...so it would seem to run much more slowly--but in reality, not much more slowly than XP, prior to being streamlined.

My personal favorite XP services tweak site, BlackViper, is down at the moment, but an enterprising fellow geek posted this tweaked version of part of his site, here: http://www.dead-eye.net/WinXP%20Services.htm (I highly recommend creating a new profile for your changes, if you're going to be doing any major tweaking, so that you can easily switch to your default profile when booting up.)

If you can answer the questions I've posted--I may be able to make some additional suggestions, as well...although I'm sure that many other folks here would be just as helpful.

[Kraellin]

hi guys,
thanks for the advices. what i've done is use the restore point that microsoft sets before installing sp2 and just gone back to the way things were. so, no sp2 for now. the restore point worked just fine and i've got my more or less snappy machine back now.

to MM, i hate using re-formats to solve problems like this except as a very last resort. i just believe things shld work and that they can be fixed and that i learn more by doing so. just a different philosophy and nothing wrong particularly with re-formatting; i just hate going that route if i dont have to.

gary, interesting site. i do have a p4 celeron with this machine and it wouldnt surprise me if it's one of those mentioned on that site. i'll look into that further.

and briar, yes, i'm a big fan of blackviper and have been for years. that's why i started trimming services as soon as this bog showed up. and, like you said, his site is 'under construction' at the moment, and apparently has been for some time. and like you also mentioned, the site has been mirrored other places. i didnt know about the mirrors, so thank you for that. but, i did know about 'the wayback machine' site, which archives sites. so, i was able to use that to get his last known site map and content. and i used that to start trimming services. it seemed to help some, but i was still getting a large lag and apps starting and stopping. before using the archive it took over 5 minutes for just windows explorer to load. after trimming it was still taking about 2 minutes. not good enough.

so, to all of you, first, i thank you and second, what i'm probably going to do, and gary knows something about this, is fix windows first. yes, my xp was already partially broken from a crash about 8 to 10 months ago. it still worked, but it broke some items like my lan, system tools and other things. it also messed up some administrator priveledges that i couldnt even fix in the registry. so, this may be what sp 2 was balking over. i never got an error message on anything, but like briar said, sp2 wasnt supposed to bog things down like this. so, maybe the partially broken xp had something to do with it.

so, the plan is this: fix windows. the current version on my machine is an oem version. so, all i have is a 'restore' cd. this does not have the repair console. all it will do is wipe windows completely clean, re-format the drive and put windows back on. that's not acceptable to me. but, i do have a retail version of a full install that does have all the repair console stuff on it. so, i'll either try using the repair console in the full version on the oem version and see if that will fix xp. or, i'll use magic mover to take almost everything off the windows partition, then make an additional partition, leaving only windows on one and a clean partition for the remainder and wipe the new windows partition completely and use the full install retail version to re-install with.

i dont really want to wipe windows because that means wiping the registry and i have literally hundreds of programs tied to that registry that i'll then have to re-install. big headache. but i may have to do it. i REALLY wish microcrap had never gone to a registry system. it's more pain than it's worth. bring back the .ini files!

at any rate, the bottom line here seems to be check my processor type to see if it fits with the data on that site gary linked me to and fix or replace windows before trying to put sp2 back on my machine.

so again, thanks for the help!

craig

[briarrose]

Ah--another geek! All geeks know BlackViper! (I bet you know KellysKorner, too, don't you! ) (His site was back up for a while...without an explanation...so I was surprised to see it back down again. Ironically--I was LOOKING for the wayback version of his site, when I came across the site I sent you. Great minds, eh? )

Buggy XP to start with doesn't sound promising. :-/ In fact, I'm a sysadmin, and the only times I've ever had problems with XSP2 installs were when I was starting off with bad XP...and even though I managed, in a few cases, to manually fix the problems afterwards, it was probably more trouble than it was worth--shoulda just reinstalled. (Have you had any luck with repair console before? I never have, so I never recommend it...but if you get it to work--more power to ya!)

If you wind up reinstalling--after you've reinstalled everything and tweaked to your heart's content, you should consider creating an image, and filing it away, for times like this... (Yeah, I know--everyone recommends it--no one does it. It IS good advice, though--one that I try to follow myself...with...ahem...varying degrees of success... I always have such a cozy feeling in my tummy, when I KNOW I have a pristine image to use, though, when it looks like I might need to reinstall--which is INVARIABLY, when I have a deadline of some sort...and I always feel so STUPID, when I don't have one, and find myself in that situation! )

Good luck to you!

[Cameraken]

Craig.

I understand why you don’t want to reformat.

There is possibly another way. I can’t talk you all the way through it but I did it once with a method I found on the Web. Anyway it goes something like this.

Rename your Windows folder to something like Winold
Re-install Windows But force it to install into a new windows folder.

Now you should have a clean working windows you can the copy the registry across from your Winold folder to your new windows folder. You can also copy across your settings. Desktop Drivers etc.

Copying the registry etc MAY reintroduce your old problem, in which case you will have no option but a reinstall.

Hope that makes sense. Maybe someone has more info on this.

Ken

[Kraellin]

briar,

hehe, yup, semi-geek here i say semi- because normally i build and maintain my own computers and have had my turn on 'system support'. i learned about the demi-god, blackviper from tech tv's 'attack of the show' (before it was 'attack of the show and got all glitzy, commercial and worthless). leo and patrick!

but i'm not a die-hard geek, but i do own three computers

yes, windows crashed HARD on me a while back, but xp is a bit more robust than 98 ever was and it seemed to recover without a reboot. so, i tried what i was doing again and it crashed HARD again. well, on my next reboot i found out windows xp has this new feature that if it cant recover itself one way, it will try another. and that other way is, it wipes certain things out, including registry entries for windows itself. cute. i even found the log file that confirmed this (months ago).

i've been living with the machine as is. it does still mostly work. it did, however disable part of the communication in my lan, which i had just recently set up. i could still do file transfers between my xp and 98 machine, but i had to iniitiate them all from the 98 machine. i completely lost my system information tool. it told me i didnt have admin rights. ppphhhfffttt! there were a couple other things like i lost, but it was ok for the most part. i did try to find and fix things at the time, but finally just kind of gave up. i even managed to get a free call into microbunk and discussed the matter with them. they basically didnt know any more than i did and recommended pretty much what i've already mentioned in my other post about fixes for this. they werent even sure if i could use the retail version to fix the oem version. oh, and the call went to India, btw.

ok, since posting my last post, i dug up Everest. for those that dont know what Everest is, it's the BEST, FREE system information utility you'll ever find for an ibm compatible pc, bar none. i dont know if they're still offering a free version. i see on their home page they now have 3 versions (it used to be only 2). i believe the HOME version was the free version. and having just looked at their site, i see they have discontinued it no doubt you can find the HOME version on the web somewhere, though. and if you cant, send me a p.m. and we'll talk here's the link to the Everest home page: http://www.lavalys.com/

the good news is, i dont have a celeron D. i have a straight old celeron (everest reports it as a celeron 4). i also checked the manufacturer's site for the motherboard and there is no bios update for this board. so, that handles that part of it.

and, the other, sort of good news is, i found micro$oft site that has sp2 as an independent download. no 'update' thing to go through. so, i've downloaded that onto a separate partition in case i want to go that way. you can find that here: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/secu...xp/getsp2.mspx just follow the 'download sp2 from the download center' link and you can get it that way. read for yourself whether this is a good idea or not. this is NOT a confidential site or restricted in any way, so i'm not violating any rules or anything here by making that known.

ok, so it appears i'm pretty much down to fixing xp. and ken, that is an excellent idea! i even seem to remember doing something like this once when i had a harddrive crash on me once. excellent! i think the way i did it was move the current windows harddrive off of the C: drive and put a new one there. i installed the old drive on a different partition. it could still be read; it just couldnt be written to. i renamed the windows directory to something else so there was no chance for it to be taken as the boot drive and installed windows on the new C: drive. i then did what you suggested and moved at least parts of various things from the old windows onto the new drive and it worked just fine. i forget whether i moved all or parts or none of the registry, but i do recall moving some things. i like it

and gary, i want you to know that i did and do appreciate your past and present help. the reason i never did the things you recommended before was primarily uncertainty on my part. gray, muddy waters like that always make me hesitant. but the necessity on fixing this has increased, so even though it might have seemed like it all just went in one ear and out the other, it didnt

thanks guys

craig

[Gary Richardson]

No problem Craig. Any advice I offer can only be of a general nature, and circumstances will greatly affect any decision you make as to whether you want to follow it or not.

Only you can make decisions, based on a much clearer picture of the problem and how it impacts your computer use.

Good luck with your SP2 update, keep us posted as to how it goes.

Gary.

As you are a user of Kelly's Korner, here's a few more useful sites.

http://windowsxp.mvps.org/
http://inetexplorer.mvps.org/ie.html (best for IE problems)
http://www.annoyances.org/
http://www.dougknox.com/

[Kraellin]

well, i seem to have found two reasons why the original install of sp2 failed and possibly why sp2 was running so poorly. first off, anticipating a possible re-install or serious repair of xp, i did a backup. during the backup AVG anti virus went off and found a virus as the drive files were scanned. so, that was one possibility. the other is my mouse seems to have gone haywire and apparently it went haywire during the initial download and setup of sp2 and that seems to be what stalled it out and why i had to kill it.

so, i've removed the virus and installed a new mouse.

i've also been studying my options as to what to do and i recalled a conversation i had with one of my older brothers once. he had once suggested that i could run an install of xp OVER xp; that xp was smart enough to know what was going on. and, that this would actually act as a repair of windows. i also studied the repair and recovery console on the microsoft site and from what i could find there about it, it WON'T do what i want of it. it looks to be more of an emergency boot fix console, just to get your machine up and running, not to fix all of windows.

also in anticipation of trying to fix all this stuff, i've installed partition magic 8. the plan there is to move as much stuff off the c: drive before doing anything else as a precaution to catastrophe. i'll then repartition the drive, one for a boot/windows drive and the other for major, highly used utilities and programs. this will make any future difficulties with windows easier to handle...hopefully.

now, i'm fully aware of xp's disk management feature. i've used it to partition and format drives FROM windows before. great utility. i put partition magic on because it used to have an incredible application called Magic Mover that came with it. that little app would actually move program locations and re-write the registry stuff for that program to match up to the new location. wonderful little app. sadly, i see no mention any more of magic mover, so i dont know. also, i see symantec has bought out powerquest. too bad. it seems symantec is going to go the way of microsoft and require .net on your machine and possibly even online authentication. more bloatware and privacy invasions so, i'm not going to register my version 8!

so, things are going slowly, but they are going. i'll continue to study and check out options and read gary's links

and no, i never went to kellys korner before you guys told me about it. but i did go today and look things over. nice site and some great little tweaking stuff on there.

craig

[Kraellin]

YES!!! it worked!!! i've got my system information back!!! and my other system tools are working again and though i havent tried it yet, i'll bet my lan networking is working again too!!! amazing!!! i've been trying (sort of, now and again, well, a bit....ok, i went into apathy on this a long time ago and quit trying ) to get this thing fixed for over a year!!! not even a call to microsoft support could fix this thing!!! i didnt even have to reboot the system after the fix!!! freaking hallelujah!!!

that was amazing! i ran the .bat file and it took a LONG time to run. understand that my registry is BIG! the subsequent log files are BIG also but immediately upon completion i had my broken windows stuff working again! now, THAT'S service! this thing was all about broken permissions and NOBODY could seem to fix it. it may well be why my installation of service pack 2 was running so horribly slow as well. i'll have to try that again now and see.

ok, that's a quote from this thread: http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/sho...5&postcount=10 . this has been plaguing me since about november of 2004 and nobody could fix it! windows still basically worked and in reality very few CRITICAL things were messed up, but nonetheless it has bugged me ever since. it wasnt worth re-formatting or re-installing windows, and it wasnt interfering with other software installations or executions, but in trying to get service pack 2 to install and run, it may very well have had a HUGE impact. that's yet to be seen.

but every trick i've tried to get sp2 to install and work has come up the same way, my machine bogs to a crawl and i've had to disable the whole thing by using a restore point. and just as a side note here, i'd NEVER used any restore points before. it worked flawlessly. so, that's just a side benefit.

so, the only question now is, will sp2 now work without bringing my system to its knees. i'll be trying again today and let you know.

craig

[briarrose]

Good luck with that, Craig! Sounds like you're a bit like me...I might fix other people's computers for a living...but when it comes to my own--I'm willing to put up with all sorts of bad behavior, rather than "waste" a Saturday trying to fix it. Oh, I'll do a BIT of poking around...but if I'm having a problem I can't fix--it's going to be something REALLY obscure...and I'd rather just live with it, than bother over much. Only the problems begin adding up...and one day I realize that I've got quite a few things that I should address--and I'd just never realized, because as each new behavior surfaces, I'd just adjust to it, and move on--forgetting about all the adjustments I'd ALREADY made! A bit daft...but hey, it works for me!

(And glad you checked out Kelly's Korner! While most of her stuff can be found elsewhere on the web--I LOVE that she's written registry snippets that you can just download and run, instead of having to manually edit the registry yourself...and she's inspired me to write out my own, as well, for anything I do on more than one PC. I've got a whole folder full of "new PC" fixes that I run, like disabling balloon tips...and quite a few are things I just downloaded from her...)

[Bryan L]

In my shop we install SP2 around 4-10 times per day! We never have problems as we are generally doing it on a clean install. SP2 was a problem back in the early days when it first came out and there were driver problems. I have close to 1000 computer customers and we really never have SP2 problems.

(Side Note: To install over the top of XP as a repair....all programs and drivers still intact... don't press the 'R' for repair on the first screen. That takes you to the console which isn't what you want. You have to continue to the next screen just like you are going to install windows fresh; "ENTER" I think. Then when you see the screen that shows you your current installations you hit 'R' there and that will do an install over the top. Not like the Win 98 install over the top though. The XP version makes it so that everything still works, programs etc. This often works great if you get the imfamous STOP error on bootup. A lot of shops and techs will tell you that you need to do a full reinstall at this point and this isn't always the case.)

I know it stinks to have to format and install windows again but this is often a good choice. I refer to it as "cutting off a head to fix a headache". Its often during the reinstalls that you find out if its software or hardware based. If windows won't reinstall, etc, then its often a hardware problem (not refering to Kraelin's problem, just saying 'in general'.)

I started a practice for myself a while back that took a little time but I have loved it! Back along I did a format and reinstall. Did all the updates, installed all my programs and got everything just the way that I wanted. Then I cloned my harddrive to a second drive and stored the second drive away.

Now, whenever I want to have a 'clean start' I backup all my favorites, email, etc. I keep "My Documents" on a second harddrive anyhow. I swap out the shelved drive and I'm up and running on a new drive in minutes. I do all the updates (safe to assume that if that drive has been on the shelf for more than 3 weeks then there are more windows xp updates). If I have added any new programs to the arsenal since the last close I install them. Then I wipe out the harddrive I'm replacing, reclone it, and start the whole process over.

I know its rather off topic but it really works well for the investment. Harddrives are very inexpensive these days and are not hard to install for the non-geekish. The cloning process is easy. You would need a $20 OEM copy of Norton Ghost.

Sorry for the rather off topic discussion, but I thought someone might find it helpful.

-B

[CJ Swartz]

Craig, if we had a "fingers crossed" emoticon on here, I'd put a few of those up for you, but I'll just hope that your latest try works.

Craig, Briar, Gary, Ken, Murray, and Bryan -- your discussion and your links will help others who might never post a question -- THANKS for your willingness to share your knowledge. You are part of what makes the internet such a powerful and important addition to Civilization!

[Kraellin]

Sounds like you're a bit like me...I might fix other people's computers for a living...but when it comes to my own--I'm willing to put up with all sorts of bad behavior, rather than "waste" a Saturday trying to fix it.

briar,
i am EXACTLY like that and with more than just my computer i used to run a home repair business and could just about ANYTHING that could break in a house, including all the various systems in a house. but, my own house was 'yeah, one of these days' the thing is, when you do work for someone else, you get rewarded. when you do it for yourself, you do still get rewarded by a job well done, but it's not the same as a 'thank you! and a monetary compensation.

bryan,
no, that wasnt off-topic at all. i've been trying ever since i got xp to confirm that one could install over the top as a fix! some folks thought maybe, some thought not, but nobody seemed to really be able to confirm it solidly. so, thank you for that!

now, one other question for you, bryan, i have an oem machine, but all that came with was a restore cd. all that does is wipe EVERYTHING on the drives and re-install the oem. that is NOT what i want. so, a while back i went out and bought the retail version. what i'd like to know is, is it possible to do that over-the-top fix of an oem version with the full retail version? and, if it is possible, would you then be required to re-authenticate with microsoft being that you'd likely have to use the cd key to get this to work? seems like it, but i'd like to know this sort of thing before i go playing around and break something.

cj,

thank you very much for the fingers crossed! and, you're welcome. a person is only as valuable as his ability to help others. so, i hope i'm always valuable

craig