First off, excellent post. Second, I would like to simply make a note.
You wrote: "OTOH, there are lots of posters who base thier advice on a
narrow range of experience; either "works fine on the 12 PCs I installed
it on" or "I installed it on mine, and it was a disaster!". How narrow
are the thousands of people that were part of the technical beta
program? How many computers do each of these thousands of people own to
even further multiply that? There were a ton of systems involved in the
testing of this OS. Sure there are a few snags and those that were
reported the most got fixed. There were so many bug reports there was
no way to give attention to them all, only recurring ones. They changed
the code from previous builds that affected the use of Windows on the
Prescott. I do not want to go too far into this as I'm not entirely
sure what is covered by NDA, while keeping it to what most everyone else
already knows, this service pack was extremely well tested.
It is unfortunate that these problems have occured, which is something
for Microsoft to work on in the future. There is a lot to be learned on
both sides. Those with systems that didn't respond well to SP2 should
find themselves asking why and not automatically saying it was MS's
fault (though it may be). Perhaps it was the state of the computer
before upgrading or perhaps it is just a problem with the software.
Either way, it is important to maintain a healthy computer.
----
Nathan McNulty
I'll certainly agree with your "garbage" position, there are hundreds
of knee-jerk platitude postings here about what people should do when
they have SP2 problems that have nothing to do with details and almost
no evidence that doing them has accomplished the desired goal.
Ai, be nice ;-)
Speaking for myself, I find ngs with > 500 posts a day to be more than
I can manage. Up to 20 posts a day, I can read every one and reply to
all that I can contribute to; I try to do that in the .za groups. Up
to 150 a day, I can read all subject headers and usually maintain
continuity. But xp.general's 1000-2000 a day is simply too much; I
follow up threads that my Free Agent is "watching", and I look for
"sp2" in the first few and the last few new subject headers, and the
rest I delete unseen. Brutal, but that's all I can do.
Because I've had detailed and early exposure to the Prescott issue, I
focus on that - but I don't just bang out that advice to all SP2
issues; I read to see whether it's relevant. It's relevant when the
particular failure pattern comes up (installs OK, locks every
subsequent boot with no error messages) or when it's a "should I
install SP2?" post ("do you have a recent system with Intel CPU?")
OTOH, there are lots of posters who base thier advice on a narrow
range of experience; either "works fine on the 12 PCs I installed it
on" or "I installed it on mine, and it was a disaster!". That becomes
a real problem when these posters arrogantly dismiss other poster's
mileage, e.g. "because it worked fine on my 12 PCs, there must be
something wrong with you or the way you installed SP2".
I don't reply to a lot of posts, but do spend quite a bit of time on
each. That's all very well, but may be less effective than someone
who helps more readers by replying to more posts, even if it is only
to paste in boilerplate text, or off-the-page URLs.
...love the ones that think defragging enough might yield a miracle.
Ah, that's one of my pet hates!
Please, dudes, raise your soldering iron in your right hand and
inscribe the following on the back of your left hand:
"Defrag is NOT a troubleshooting tool, and is dangerous
for unknown and troublesome PCs that may have at-risk
file systems, hard drives or other flaky hware e.g. RAM"
A fragged file system will slow things down to a mild to moderate
extent, but the only stability impact is that the critical window
period of file system operations may be prolonged.
You can search the last 4000 postings in the windowsxp.general
newsgroup and look for Explorer to see how similar the descs are.
Er, I can't do that easily, as it happens. Dunno how to do it in Free
Agent, not keen on wading around through a browser ;-)
Most of these crash when a user clicks on an entry or double
clicks on an entry to open it. Scan all the postings an try to
see that they apparently fall into one or two, maybe three groups,
and the descriptions are actually pretty consistent.
I'd love to harvest that info, but frankly it looks like too much
work. Normally, I'd suggest you post a new thread and I'd catch you
there, but this "xp.general" ng is so full I'd likely never see it -
and bulging a new sub-thread out of this one isn't great either.
If you like, you could email me directly, or maybe we could start a
new thread in a quieter ng such as...
microsoft.public.windowsxp.configuration_manage
...and if you tell me (by reply in this thread) what subject line to
look out for, I'll meet you there.
..."my computer is on fire" and you would get MVP's saying
"scan for viruses and spyware".
Ah, yes. Well, because malware is designed to defy troubleshooting
and mimic other things (including unrelated error messages), I see
great value in excluding this as part of the "prelim".
This is dogfood that I eat myself. Whenever an arbitrary PC comes in,
I don't even run Windows until I've done this...
http://cquirke.mvps.org/9x/bthink.htm
...i.e. checked for RAM and HD errors and formally scanned for
traditional malware. Only then do I go interactive, and usually the
first thing I do in Windows is to scan for and manage commercial
malware ("spyware" etc.). Then I know that the floorboards I'm
walking on are not going to collapse, and that the black boxes I reach
my hand into aren't going to contain snakes that bite me!
but I think a disproportionate amount of the problems in the install
of SP2 have been "dealt with" by just pointing fingers at supposed
viruses and spyware, with extremely few reports that this was found
to then be the case.
What I look for are stereotypical patterns of failure, and these
usually relate to specific issues, e.g.:
- specific STOP errors on start
- keeps rebooting on start
- locks up on black GUI on all boots (Ptrescott)
- runs OK normally but Safe Mode fails
OTOH, when the PC is infected with one/some of multiple malware, the
chances are it's also been subjected to bit-rot from AutoChk "fixing"
broken files are numerous bad exits. The chance of any stereotypical
pattern emerging out of this sprawl of permutations is slight.
And at the end of one of my postings, clearly anyone who was thinking
about doing an upgrade with naive users and who easily could have had
compromised systems would might have thought to do a scan for stuff
like this before doing the install. That might have easily saved 90%
of the people from having these problems
Yes, but it's not easy for MS to make specific recommendadtions here,
without Qs like; why recommend av product X and not Y? etc.
Also, MS may (should) find it embarrasing that NTFS lacks a proper
maintenance OS from which a formal virus scan can be done.
I cannot imagine why they didn't 1: virus scan,
Lack of mOS is a big obstacle for those who bought the hype and went
NTFS. You can hardly expect MS to say...
- use the WinPE boot CD (that we won't license to you)
- use Bart's PE
- use a Linux boot CDR
...and the usual advice to...
- use Safe Mode and Stinger (which scans for 60 out of thousands)
- visit an online av scanning site
...is pathetically weak for obvious reasons.
2: spyware scan,
3: sfc run
I wouldn't have thought of that ;-)
How does one do that, i.e. what built-in tools does XP offer?
Dangerous advice if online (need that firrewall!)
I don't think that anywhere in the Microsoft "instructions" did it
say that you first needed to do a virus scan, fix any problems,
then do a spyware scan, fix any problems, ...
Yes - there's a conflict of interest between wanting all PCs to patch
up, and warning on all the risks / precautions of patching up.
There's also an inherent tech-awareness mismatch between the low level
of tech insight that SP seeks to support, and the higher level of tech
insight needed to validate PC as safe for SP2 application.
This is the specific issue I want to flesh out off-thread...
Yes, but what happened?
Thinking that this is likely to be where the body's buried. Most of
us have pet tools and things we like to install on all systems we
touch, and a conflict with one of these may make the problem look more
global than it is. For example, I always build with FATxx, not NTFS,
and use multiple volumes with XP installed in a path other than
C:\Windows; anything that fails on that will fail on "all" (my) PCs.
nope, actually, trying to not mess too much with the system until
we can actually find the real root cause of this.
I can relate to that. If you find that Safe and MSConfig suppression
both fail in the same way, then try Safe Mode Command Only, and see if
that works fine until you run Explorer. If it does, then you could
try normal mode with something other than Explorer as shell=
(something I've rarely done in XP but often in 9x), or just proceed
directly to Shell Extension Viewer - which shows shell integrations
that MSConfig doesn't, and which may be active in "safe".
nope, but run very few things like that myself
Other things may run from there, that's the point - not just malware,
but accepted software too.
No LAN factor? OK. Most new mobos have LAN built-in, so it's still a
step worth trying, in case the PC goes off on a doomed "let's find an
IP address for this PC's (non-existant) LAN" quest.
I've done hijack this scans and have very few of those present
OK, but it still may be worth suppressing these via that setting.
Well, I'd really rather not risk blowing away my complete system
just to see whether the file system makes a difference unless you
can show me how much it is going to be worth to me
No, what I meant was; are your test systems NTFS or FATxx or both? My
own is FATxx, so if all of yours are NTFS and you wanted me to test on
FATxx, I could, as long as you can encapsulate the test suite.
I did escalate my Windows Explorer problem to Microsoft. They came
back and concluded "some file must be corrupted, repair windows back
to the original state and try reinstalling SP2 twice while you are
in Safe mode." Before I did that someone found that some folks see
Windows Explorer work when they create a new user and switch to that
user. I did that and in my case it works, also works in Safe mode.
Ahhh... OK, then what ye seek is mediated by per-account settings:
- HKCU
- HKCU overrides of HKCR (new XP feature)
- StartUp
- "other"
I sent this additional info to MS, saying that this seemed to make
it less likely that "some file was corrupted" and asked for their
analysis. There has been no reponse from them for days now on this.
OK. From what you've given me, I can't get very specific either.
I don't know how I could tell you whether that is the case or not.
Sure, it's not always easy to get tools to show you what you need to
know, and sometimes you need (hopefully free) 3rd-party tools such as
Shell Extension Viewer. It's a good start to know what you need to
find out, though, and that's the spirit of my advice.
Things that are relevant here:
- LAN drive mappings
- NTFS re-parse points (trickery such as "call C:\This\Path" "D:")
- other NTFS funnies (EFS, sparse files, compression, quota etc.)
- virtual CD, i.e. "copy CD to HD and treat as drive letter"
- 3rd-partyware that treats "private" files as drive letters
- 3rd-partyware that drop non-file, non-shortcut items on desktop
- anything odd that shows up outside drive letters in Explorer
- TweakUI settings to hide drives etc.
- cameraware that jumps in to manage USB plug-ins
- CDRW packet-writing sware that fiddles with CDRW drive
...as can viruses, of course.
Think any sort of indexers (including the Indexing Service), anything
that maintains thumbnail views, things that extract icons out of
graphic file content, etc.
In my case Windows Explorer doesn't crash, it actually refuses to accept
any mouse click or keystroke and just "pongs" at me.
Ah; use Alt-Tab to see if there's an "always in front" modal dialog
box that is not in front, thus presenting as a pseudo-crash.
most other folks report crashes on clicks or right clicks.
Clicks, and especially rt-clicks, smell like context menu integration.
Thar be many, many dragons; think WinZip, WinRAR, IOmegaware,
packet-writing CDRWware, av, all manner of fluff.
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Error Messages Are Your Friends
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[/QUOTE]
