The kids have a compaq pressario pc(amd 64 3200+)the hard drive gave up the ghost so i installed another and put in the recovery disc i made just after i bought it new.the prob is that the machine downloads and installs all the updates fine but when i try sp2 the machine freezes resulting in the recovery cd having to be reinstalled, any ideas folks

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--Zxian

Have you tried installing the Network install of SP2?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en

Did you make this recovery CD yourself from a basic Windows install CD?

the cd was made with the option you get to make one after you uppack and set up the machine for the first time,as for network sp2 i am not quite sure about this.i have a sp2 installation disc from microsoft but it does the same

It could be a bad CD. Try downloading the network installation version to see if it does the same thing.

Edited January 10, 200620 yr by nmX.Memnoch

Try booting into Safe Mode and installing.

I created a slipstream version of WinXP SP2 and it saves a lot of time. The easiest way to do it is to get Autostreamer from Neowin.net

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=223562

welcome to the world of wonderful reasons to NOT buy an OEM

of course that may not be the problem at all.

install the network (off-line) version of SP2, as suggested earlier and see if that does it.

thanks guys for your replies,,i installed the network version and everything seemed ok for a while untill the machine done the automatic updates and then it hung after reboot and will not restart,any ideas

you may have had a prior problem i suppose. or, like i said, i guess it could be a problem because it's an OEM installation. i dunno. search areound and see what you can see.

You could have had spyware on your machine prior to the SP2 install. I think that is your problem. A lot of my friends got f**ked when SP2 was released the first time because their machines were alread y playing hosts to malicious software. SP2 is a total recompile of key internal components that prevent buffer overflow attacks. Note how after the update every bug fix is non buffer overflow related. So maybe a fresh reformat would do the trick. Reformat and then update. Then install other software.