Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Windows updates failed: no computer anymore...

Feb 16, 2011 10:17PM PST

I am typing this from my laptop as my desktop computer, equipped with Vista Home Premium system (2009) won't open Windows anymore. The newest automatic Windows updates (I don't know the details) happened about a week ago and every time I closed/started the computer, this message came up: "Updates were not configured correctly. Reverting changes. Do not power off...". Every time I waited and eventually Windows would open or the computer would shut down, as desired. Today, it apparently went through - AGAIN - the 7 updates processing and then the screen went black and that was it. I tried to do a Ctrl-Alt-delete and the screen came up but nothing could be done as it returned to a black screen. I unplugged the computer again in order to start it again... it does start OK (no blue screen) but it stopped when reaching the part to open Windows (blank/black screen).
Please Help!

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Re: Windows update failed
Feb 16, 2011 10:28PM PST
- Collapse -
I had an issue with Windows Updates on Vista Home Premium
Feb 16, 2011 11:50PM PST

Have Vista Home Premium 2007 IE8 DSL from ATT & BYOA from MSN. In Nov. 2010 Windows was downloading an update and when it got to stage 3 of 3, with same messageof do not power off, it hung up at that point. Next day it was still 0% of 3 of 3. Ctl+Alt+Del did nothing, couldn't get to task manager so I powered it off. When powered on I got the message of improper shutdown & chose start normally, when it finally came up I was back at the hung up download. Tried this couple more times and got the same every start up. Couldn't stop the download. I called my MSN IP he had me disable auto-updates, shut down, restart in safe mode and immediatly press F8 repeatdly until I got "Repair your PC" window. Type in "CD(space)windows\winsxs"; next command was "ren(space)pending.xml(space)pending.old". He told me this tells the PC to go back to it's previous configuration. WARNING have your Operating Disk for Vista Home Premium before you try this. I didn't need to use it but the tech told me it was possible I would. The last part was to exit, restart my PC normally. It worked and I got my desktop. One issue I have found is that I have Ad-Aware Pro and if it is scanning it will cause an auto-update to fail so now until my subscription expires I have to check if my updates were successful.