service F-ing pack one
 

Afternoon chaps. Ran into a problem this am. Update to SP1 on Vista was offered and although I had a lurking feeling that it was already on I went for it. When it was going thro' the "install" process it got to 3 of 3 and went TU and when I came back to check there was a black screen claiming that there had been a problem caused by a recent download and did I want it to repair itself automatically. OK I did. The short version of this tale is that right now I'm looking at a restore screen that says "finalizing file restore...." and it's been like that for at least 1.45 hrs. Is it likely to stop or is it in some kind of loop? Help please.
The Ancient Mariner

What AV do you use, Rossian?
I have friends who had interminable problems trying to install a SP on XP, while Norton 360 was guarding the fort. (Some error messages would have been nice, but '360 don't do that too well, apparently.)
The answer ended up being to uninstall the AV, uninstall the (partially installed) SP, reboot, install the SP properly, then re-install the AV. Took a day and a half to work that out; an hour and a half to do once worked out.

Thoe of us who go to enormous lengths to retain XP as our operating system know the real answer to this one!

P.P.

Rossian - I ran into mega problems when I tried to download SP1.

It would not work as long as the PC had over 3Gb of RAM - when I dropped from 8Gb to 2Gb it went perfectly.

problems
 

Tarq57 and Keygrip

The situation now is that I can't get in to do anything. It popped up a message this AM to say it was trying to repair itself but another window told me that it couldn't do that and to shut it down. Not terribly informative or helpful.
I'm surprised that no-one has popped up to tell me I should have bought a Mac in the first place rather than coming up with any helpful remarks.
Looks like it's a visit to Slack Jack's "we fix computers" shop.
The Ancient Mariner

Sounds pretty much like a problem I have with my laptop.

Before running off to get a paid repair - hold down F5 on boot up, select repair anad if possible select last known restore point which will restore the system to prior the SP update.

The problem I have with my laptop which wont install the update is one of the checksums on a system file is incorrect - the system works perfectly but SP1 fails to install spectacularly - its well documented and a complete pain in the a$$ - the only fix is to re-install the OS from scratch which is not practical at the moment.