July 7, 2009 - this is the day my Microsoft Updates showed me a few very large Vista updates. They were over 230 MB each. I don't remember what the names of the updates were, but I saw that they were Vista updates and I accepted that and let them install.
The next day, when I rebooted my machine I noticed that I suddenly didn't have an Internet connection. When I hovered my mouse over the icon in the system tray, it said that there was no class defined. What does that mean?
When I went to the Network and Sharing Center, it showed nothing! Nada! Zilch! No wireless network, and no Internet, and worst of all, no local computer. There were some other things that I noticed weren't working as they should, so I called Dell.
I have a three year extended warranty and it was still good, so I called them to see if they had any suggestions as to what I should do. After I let the tech guy know what I had done and what had happened, he gave me the news I dreaded...
"Back it up and reformat!"
AAhhh!!!
I will abbreviate most of what I've had to go through, but today is Saturday July 11, 2009 and I've finally installed the OS (for the fifth time) and all the updates and also Vista SP1 and SP2.
After SP1 was installed I still had around 50 updates to install, but let me tell you what I did.
I'll back up a second and tell you what my previous installations were like. The OS installation was pretty painless as it only took about 20 minutes to install. The part that was completely frustrating and forced me to reinstall the OS yet again, was when I started installing the 82 Microsoft Updates that were needed.
The first time I selected all 82 and let them install. Ok, granted, that was probably a stupid thing to do, but I was impatient. It took 1 hour and 30 minutes to finish. Then I restarted and it crashed!
It went to some command-line program called "wpeinit" and ran some error logs and then fell into a loop. It would try to reboot, and then go right back into the WPEINIT. So I had to force it to turn off.
So I reinstalled the OS again, and decided to install the 82 updates in segments. I sorted the list of updates by the release date and installed the oldest ones first. That all worked fine for a while until suddenly, that damned WPEINIT appeared after a reboot.
Reinstalled the OS. I called Dell back and told them about what was happening and they didn't have any better suggestions that what I was doing, but if in the case I would get that WPEINIT crash again, I should reboot in Safe Mode.
The Dell guy suggested that I do a "System Restore" immediately after the crash to restore to the last good installation. I did that and it worked. But that doesn't fix the problem of I probably need that update that is crashing my machine, and what do I do to get it installed?
So I asked the Dell guy if after installing the OS yet again, I should just download the SP1 and install it, will that work? He says it probably should because they are shipping computers now with the SP1 installed OEM. So that's what I did.
I have another computer where I downloaded the SP1 and put it on a thumb drive while I was reinstalling the OS again.
Oh, another reason why I had to reinstall one of the times, was because the Dell tech guy said that I installed the device drivers that come on the CD with the computer, in the wrong order. I told him I simply went down the list. How was I supposed to do it? He showed me on the Dell site, in the support area, that there is a list that shows the order the drivers are supposed to be installed in.
Click here for install order.
I gently asked him why the list on the CD wasn't in the order that they should be installed in, and he didn't have an answer for me. I told him it would never occur to me to go to the web site to look for this information. I suggested he make a note to the developers of the CD that they should probably list them in order.
Any way, this is the list as I've installed them on my machine.
- Desktop System Software (DSS) or Notebook System Software (NSS) - IMPORTANT!
- Chipset - IMPORTANT!
- Video Adapter
- Network Interface Card (NIC)
- (Laptops only) Dell Quickset or Dell Control Point Manager (DCP)
- Audio Driver
- Touchpad driver
- Bluetooth driver
The first two drivers, NSS and Chipset I'm told are the only two that need to be done as 1 and 2. The rest can pretty much be done in any order.
And BTW, I downloaded all the drivers I needed from the Dell site and did NOT use the ones on the CD. This was a suggestion from the Dell technician and it was a good one.
After installing the OS and the drivers, I installed the SP1. It took a little while, and afterward, there were still over 40 updates to install. I installed them slowly, by date and it tooks hours, but I finally got it done.
Then a nice thing happened when all the SP1 and other updates were installed, when I checked for more updates, it said that SP2 was available. It will only do this through Windows Update, if you have all the necessary updates already installed on your system. Otherwise you will never see SP2.
So I read a little on SP2 and decided it was a release version and was hopefully stable so I installed it and it installed without any problems.
Now I'm finally installing getting to install some of my applications that I actually use.
Here's a special note about disk space:
- 320 GB Hard drive
- 286 GB free after OS and updates installed
- 278 GB free after SP1 installed
- 266 GB free after 40 updates installed
- 264 GB free after SP2 installed
That's a lot of Gigabytes used without a single piece of software installed that I actually use! 56GB!
So I hope some of the pain that I went through helps you out if you are in the same situation as I was.
