Octopuss

I thought about the cable too, but like you say, it's the **** service. EventLog says the service shut down unexpectedly, and I can even see appcrash entry about the .exe file. I really don't get it. It's pretty much fresh clean installation, and the PC is only used for Word, Excel, Skype, and mails.

I am trying to solve very weird problem with my father's PC. It probably doesn't even have anything to do with any specific Windows version at all. Print spooler service keeps shutting down without any reason. The trouble is it always works just fine for some time after installing the OS, and starts to behave like this after some weeks. I made him buy Windows7 thinking it was some crap bug in XP, but no. I almost freaked out when he called me about the same thing couple days ago. It happened again today. On XP I couldn't do anything. The printers would just disappear. I started to service, and right when I tried to open properties of either of the printers (or print something), the service would shut down. On W7 it's slightly better, I could run some troubleshooters, and got an option to separate the service from the drivers or something like that, and it seemed to work. Well, not for long. It happened again today. It seems the service eventually kind of restarts and things work again, but I can't really travel to another town and sit by the PC for a couple hours, trying to replicate a problem that happens at random. Some specifics: Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit, two HP printers, LJ1022 and some multifunctional brick (psc2175 or something). Using the drivers I could find on HP web. Has anyone ran into this problem somewhere? I am out of ideas. Could it be a general bug in any Windows?

Well, then explain why I couldn't recover jack sh... even though only like first 10 GB were overwritten (the bloody system WAS installed on wrong disk like I said before), I couldn't even see a single trace of any of the huge movie files. Fully unattended setup is great... as long as you have only one physical disk in the PC

I am not saying you are wrong

Nope, it works perfectly fine in VM. When I ran into it the first few times I freaked out, but after some googling it seems to be not so uncommon problem.

The weird thing is I installed Windows on this machine at least four times in total and it always went fine. I've ran into the rather common (it seems) problem when setup pops up en error message saying there's no driver for CD/DVD drive though. Something MIGHT had gone wrong there since this is directly related to the SATA controller, though. Who knows. The good thing about this whole thing is that 1) I will start doing some more fail-proof backups from this point on 2) I bought File Scavenger

mysel, you are right. But I've been using this approach for over a year on lots of machines and it always worked without problems. I am extremely curious what the hell happened there. Disk 0 is always disk 0, isn't this kind of decided by BIOS?

Allright, I wasn't precise with terminology These days there usually is nothing like wipe unless you forcefully do it, either by specialized software or non-quick format. I couldn't recover anything, because I was double or even triple unlucky. The data disk was repartitioned by the setup, which is obviously enough to kiss anything on it good bye (I could find traces of lots of mp3 files, but reported sizes were few kB. Not a single trace of any .mkv file, and the disk was pretty much full of movies.). I was doing backups of some sort using the two disks, but how on earth could I expect this to happen.I only could imagine a disk malfunctioning, in which case I could just copy the important stuff over from the other. I had two partitions on the SSD, the 2nd being used for programs I don't install. Unfortunately, I could only recover file structure from it, nothing was readable at all, but thank satan for at least that, at least I knew what stuff I needed to redownload. Conclusion: data recovery on TRIM-enabled SSD is impossible. Now after a bit of time I guess the absolutely worst thing was losing all the favourites (and mails since 2004 too I guess, even if they were not important, just from the sentimental point of view), because over the years I saved loads of interesting and important links. Guess I need to buy some premade NAS or build a file server myself.

That doesn't sound bad. Will give it a shot. Thanks.

I've just had terrible thing happen to me. I was reinstalling Windows and something went wrong, and data disk was wiped and used for installation instead of the correct one. I use fully unattended setup which does all the partitioning for me. I got absolutely no idea why it happened because disk 0 has always been the SSD. Well I just lost 1TB of data, all documents and all programs, mails and favourites, because the dumb setup decided to magically pick different disk. Since the data disk was wiped, partitioned, and Windows was installed onto it, do I have ANY chance of recovering any data from it? I doubt. I guess specialized company could dig something out of it, but that would cost me more than two brand new computers, I can't afford that. Ideas?

Yup, trustedinstaller. No idea what that is.

Yeah I am doing more or less the same thing and it works like a charm. I absolutely hate how by default WU installs those screwed up drivers for everything before you remember to check what's going on in the background. Usually the bloody thing gladly overwrites drivers you install during unattended setup! I am a bit lost with something else atm though. I am playing around with some cosmetic nonsenses. Right now I am trying to set an icon for the standard windows.delete shell command, but there's permissions problem of some sort. I've always sucked at understanding this part of Windows, unfortunately. What I want to do is mount an image, load registry, and change some values. 99% of things work well, but for (I assume) security reasons some keys are kind of protected or locked. This is what I'm trying to import into the mounted registry: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Wim_Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CommandStore\shell\Windows.delete] "Icon"="imageres.dll,-89" I just can't change this value at all. Digging into it a little I realized the local administrator account I am running under only has read permissions! Wth! I eventually managed to take ownership and change it, but it's pain in the a**, and naturally this is supposed to be part of what a batch file does. How should I go around this specific thing?

Do you mean it is ONLY related to Windows Update? The description is bloody confusing!

Question: <ProtectYourPC>, what exactly do the settings do? I know which popup it is and what the values are, but it's not exactly clear what they do. 1 Specifies the recommended level of protection for your computer. 2 Specifies that only updates are installed 3 Specifies that automatic protection is disabled. blabla... What in the hell is recommended level of protection? What's automatic protection?

I just have a question - is it needed to use start /wait in setupcomplete.cmd? I never saw a difference.

They are about two years too late with the shutdown. Now if only people stopped using their piece of crap program.

Reminded me about installed for The lord of the rings online. No matter what you do, it overwrites any VC++ installation with specific old build, and on top of that downgrades whole DirectX

I thought the same, but these are not the latest build. A guy made sort of AIO package http://burf.cesidian.info/ and that's exactly what I mean - the packages from this bundle are of higher build than what I managed to google up. I wonder where he got them from. Btw. Is there any workaround for situations where an application setup is created in such crap way it installs one of the VC packages without giving me the option to do it manually, overwriting newer version I already have? It should theoretically not be possible, but I swear it happened to me numerous times. Sometimes I even had two different builds installed in my system. Huh..

Anyone knows where to get latest versions of the redistributable packages please? I can't think of any way to google this up, and simply looking for "vc++ <version> redist" simply won't work. And Ms's site is not exactly the best place to find stuff either... But yet people do regularly download updated versions. How?

That command in specialize pass is not needed at all.

So I finally found the guts to start educating myself on the subject of win server stuff. It's much tougher than I thought, especially since I do not have any advanced networking knowledge. I could really use a few link to some good guides about basics of configuring stuff such as DNS and DHCP, with settings explained at least in brief. Of course I googled something already, but most of the results I got were not very good. I can keep clicking next and type in some numbers the person mentions - but that doesn't get me anywhere in the end, does is. My experiences so far are mostly doing things in AD and working with GP. Any help is welcome!

Are you going to update the list any further?

lol Actually I likehttp://www.justf***inggoogleit.com/ the most. Naturally you have to retype the f word

Thank you Max, I eventually pulled the thumb out of the a** and after some searching around registry, I found that location too It works well enough.

Oh the article doesn't apply to W7 I don't have any such reg keys here.