Updates apparently died during install...

[IWantXPBack]

So...

I was in the middle of a work project that has to be done in 40 minutes, and
my Vista Business machine was getting wonky, as Vista does when you run it
for more than 12 hours. I decided to reboot.

During the shut-down, I get the dreaded "Please do not power off or unplug
your machine. Installing update X of 5."

That was 30 minutes ago.

Right now I've been staring at the "Installing update 2 of 5" for about 28
minutes. The little dots are shuffling along to the right of the message, and
the Aero circle is spinning, supposedly indicating to me that everything is
still working.

But there's very little HD activity...and seriously...30 minutes?

So, what do I do now? I'm here posting this from my "old" XP machine, that
has been running without major issue since 2004. I don't want to force a
restart of Vista, since it says right on the screen not to power off. But
honestly...how much time am I supposed to wait before I decide that there's a
problem?

Yep...35 minutes now...still installing 2 of 5.

I'm at a complete loss here.

 

[xiowan]

Hello "IWantXPBack":
Could it be that Vista SP1 was automatically downloaded and is installing
itself without you knowing it? SP1 for Vista is a very large download and
does take quite a while to install on some PC's, depending on hardware. As
it installs SP1 for Vista goes thru several "stages" and does a lot of data
configuration along the way.

xiowan......in tucson

 

[IWantXPBack]

If that's the case, then I screwed the SP1 install, since I powered my
machine down after 40 minutes of waiting.

If Microsoft is going to pump out an update that requires you to wait more
than 5 minutes when you restart your computer, they need to have some sort of
notification that this will be happening.

Like I said. I was in the middle of a project when I decided to restart in
the hopes of recovering from some standard Vista jankiness.

I did get the machine to restart without any apparent issues, although about
15 minutes ago I had a blue-screen parity failure crash. That's the second
time I've seen that screen. The last time was about seven months ago.

I'm so sick of Vista right now. I think my next machine is going to be a
Mac, and I've been using Windows since 1995.