After reading an article about the latest vulnerability of ie7 I decided to finally upgrade my spouse’s computer to ie8. I’ve been using it for awhile and it finally seemed a little less buggy. It hadn’t occurred to me that I don’t use ie8 on my XP machines, I use FireFox. The only machine I use ie8 on is a Vista laptop.
I blithely downloaded ie8 and when it rebooted my XP was corrupted. I had no explorer that worked, no screen icons, even task manager locked up when I tried to access programs through it.
I tried multiple XP repairs, using the genuine, original, pristine Microsoft CD. After several hours I realized that repairing was just not working. I could get an OS up but I couldn’t update it and kept getting obscure error messages. I put Firefox on the machine since I could not get any version of ie to work.
Then to my delight (disgust) I discovered that automatic update only works with ie. (surprise, surprise!) I could not find a download for Service Pack 2 which I hoped would fill in the gaps in the “repaired” OS. Alas Service Pack 2 eluded me. I found a tech note that said just use the Service Pack 3. I downloaded Service Pack 3 and it said, you can’t use me until you put on Service Pack 1. Well if Service Pack 2 was impossible to find, imagine how easy it wasn’t to find Service Pack 1.
So I finally gave up and did a full, reinstallation of XP instead of a repair. This involves a complete reformat which means all, ALL software needs to be reinstalled. Hours of fun and excitement all due to Microsoft.
Is it possible that Microsoft is so desperate for money to get Bill Gates back as the richest man in the world that they are intentionally trying to sabotage XP so people will move to Win7?
I want to thank those zany pranksters at Microsoft for providing me with such satisfying entertainment over the last few hours while I fix a problem that they
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