Vista updates killing my computer?

M

MaxDuo

New Member
I've had Vista on my computer for a little while now, I had to switch to it a while back when my motherboard died and XP Pro was tied to the old one. I figured I'd give Vista a try.

Anyway, for the last 2-3 months I've been having issues where Vista updates (I assume it updates, I wake up in the morning and find my computer has restarted over the night) and suddenly no programs work.

About a week and a half ago I woke up and found that my computer had restarted. I log in and tell it to open my browser and some music... wait wait wait.... nothing opens.

I try opening them again 2-3 minutes later and still no results.


I've had this happen a few times over the past 2-3 months. Every time I fix the problem by just doing a system restore to the day before.


Well this time when this happened that didn't fix it.... I restored a little earlier and still no results.



Ultimately the only system restores I had available to me were 2-3 of the most recent and several system restore undos. Not sure why suddenly I had no older ones available... but I tried doing the windows repair disk.... nothing at ALL worked for me once.

So then I found I could uninstall updates through my computer. But still no results. Actually the 2nd most recent Windows update I can't uninstall for some reason.


Is there any way at all I could fix this aside from just reinstalling Windows from scratch? I have all my files backed up, but don't want to go through all the issues of trying to set all my programs and preferences up again.


Thanks for any help, I'm pretty stuck at this point, not sure what else I can do.
 
Hi MaxDuo,

It's possible that it's not the updates that are causing it to restart at all.

Windows Vista is setup by default to restart immediately after a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) or other major system problem. This reboot usually happens too fast to see the error message on screen.

Follow these easy steps to disable the automatic restart feature for system failures in Windows Vista.
Click to expand...

Check it Out.

Give that a go and maybe we'll find out why it's really restarting.

I've had this happen a few times over the past 2-3 months. Every time I fix the problem by just doing a system restore to the day before.
Click to expand...

Yeah - that's definitely not standard practice. :P Sounds like you've got some problems somewhere.

After disabling the automatic restart on failure, try disabling all of the extra processes running. Go to Start-->Run and type in msconfig. In the Startup tab click Disable All. Then, in the Services tab, check hide all Microsoft services and click Disable All. Click OK, reboot the computer and I'll bet it runs a lot faster. Then you can start re-enabling the services you need to run at startup one at a time until you find out what's causing the crash.

Try that and see if you're able to get online after the first boot. ;)


Also - what is your computer doing while you're away? Do you leave it running with a screensaver? If so, what screensaver - could be throwing an error w/ the graphics card. Do you have other programs running all the time like games or p2p software? Or do you let it hibernate?

If you're convinced it's the updates, you can disable automatic updates in the control panel just to see if the problem goes away.

Post back with an update. I'll see if I can help you further. :D
 
Thanks for the suggestions. Right now I actually went ahead and just made a system backup along with my file backup and went ahead and started reinstalling Windows. Just decided I was too frustrated from messing with it for the past week. I've uninstalled every update from the past 2 months minus one that wouldn't uninstall for some reason. I think it was the 2nd most recent system update.....

I did have almost everything in msconfig disabled already actually, and I wasn't having any issues of the computer running slow. Also it's never crashed like that on me while I was using it, only overnight while I was sleeping, which is why I was thinking it was updates because I know they are set for 5AM or something at this point.

Overnight I usually only had instant messengers, Opera, winamp, and a few wordpads with reminders in them open. Occasionally I may have a torrent uploading. And there was one time I had Adobe Indesign open when I got off and went to bed.

So at this point the only real issue I have is just getting all my crap reinstalled, which I have mostly saved and put on a thumbdrive from my netbook.


In my head I'm just blaming Vista as it only happened now and then :P Thanks for the suggestions anyway though, I'll go ahead and set these up on my next install :)
 
Vista (SP2) is quite stable. i know people don't like getting service pakcs (myself included) but they do make quite a big difference.

My brother is on Vista original. It is slow and unresponsive. i keep telling him to get the service packs but he keeps rejecting the update...
 
My advice is to change to another OS. Vista is known to give quite a few individuals problems. That is why they came out with Windows7.
 
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