XP Service Pack 2 Without Crashing, After the Crash

I have been so much dreading doing my taxes this year. Anyway, there I was, laying on the futon with the kitties at 7:30 this morning. I thought that it would be a good time just to walk out to the computer and get the Turbo Tax thing done. I thought it was going to be easy… done in 20 minutes.

It didn't work out that way. I met a virtual alligator along the way.

“Turbo Tax cannot run because Windows XP Service Pack 2 has not been installed on your computer”.

Oh God! I had innocently tried to install Service Pack 2 years ago when it first popped up just the same as any ordinary Update. It crashed my computer and I lost six months of writing. And there it was facing me again.

At first I thought that I had a complete month to do my taxes, due April 15th of every year. I could take my computer into the shop and have the experts install Service Pack 2 or SP2 as they call it. I remember years before that some Blogger had said that installing XP SP2 was “easy”… you only had to remember to about 35 things first, followed by some incomprehensible Nerd List, telling me what sort of things to do, but supposing that ANYBODY would already know all of the specifics… file names to look for, ways to determine that specified conditions have been met. Of course there was no way, outside of attending 2 years of Nerd School that I could figure out what he had meant by any of it. Easy, yes, if you already knew everything you needed to know. I simply could not find out what I had to do to install that Thing safely. So I didn’t.

Comfortable years went by, with only occasional hints that I was not doing my duty by the defacto Lord of the Universe, Bill Gates... the same guy who failed to get Xp right the first time. Just because we are all quite used to his chronic stumbling, while taking our money, doesn't make it right. There should be a special Ring in Purgatory for a bastard like that.

But now it has been brought to issue. The World was now demanding me to do something about this SP2 Thing. I had to Comply or I would be exiled. If it were the Government we would all bitch like crazy. But thank God Corporations have the Freedom to screw over as many people as they like.

Anyway, with resistance being futile, I went back online searching for “Installing Service Pack 2 without crashing”, and found that relatively few people were reporting it nowadays, though I could easily suspect that Windows could have the wherewithal to cleanup the entire Internet of any reference to any severe difficulty with any of its products. The Truth is that Big Brother will NOT come from the Government but from some all-powerful Corporations… or the Russian Mafia. Louis the IVX was right, that our real fear should be about private Tyrants, from whom One Good Public Tyrant could protect us.

Continuing my searches, the only indications for possible trouble were about instances of Spy-ware or malicious software screwing up the Installation. Again, there is the warning but no solid information as to what to do about it. I could only guess about whether my machine was in compliance. My computer has McAfee anti-virus, and recently Windows has been issuing monthly Virus Eradication Updates. And I have been running them. And a few years back my ISP Company finally seemed to crack down on letting Viruses just slip through their systems completely unfiltered. You know, ISP’s can tell when a good many of their client computers have been hijacked, turned into Zombie Computers by some worm or virus, sending out thousands of spam emails and virus laden crap, all without the user’s least suspicion (outside of the computer seeming to act funny, but computers ALWAYS seem to act funny, no? In the Bill Gates Universe, when has a computer ever acted right? We simply have no standard of reference, no computer that has simply just worked right without sweat and tears and those annual expenses). Well, the ISPs finally seemed to do something about all those Zombie Attacks. Oh, I was even notified that my own computer had been a Zombie for awhile but was subsequently 'exorcised' or whatever they do to Zombies.

Anyway, 'no guts, no glory', and I decided to install the dreaded XP Service Pack 2. I made sure that the March Update for Virus Eradication had successfully run (from my ALL PROGRAMS, I clicked on Windows Updates which brought up the appropriate 'Wizards'), and I pushed the SP2 Go Button… and waited for almost two hours with bated breath. Scared a few times, once when it was almost completely installed it came up with an Error Notification “Service Pack 2 ran into a problem. Sorry for the inconvenience. Would you like to send a notification to Window’s so they can fix the problem (that has been sitting in the software for now going on 4 years)”. I thought that was that. I thought I would be left dead in the water. Its a good thing I didn't just exit out there, which might have really screwed me. But I hit YES, and then it allowed me to continue through, all the indications being that Service Pack 2 had successfully installed.

But then you have to do a restart. God! If only they can make movies that are so suspenseful. It seemed to take forever. To scare the crap out of people they made WAIT screens entirely of the same color Blue as the Crash Screen. Two or three times the screen went completely black. I tried to remember what had happened when I had crashed before. I think it was relatively early in the boot-up process. So maybe just getting the first WAIT screen, and then the WELCOME Screen… I don’t know when I was entirely safe. The last horror was when some strange box popped up about my Desktop, as though Windows was going to give me a new Desktop, leaving me lost to finding any of my old cluttered things, but even my old Desktop finally popped up.

Thank God! Where do I go to light a candle?