I have taken installing SP2 to lightly. Installation on the tablet went OK. The new input panel is great and I did not experience any real trouble at all working with SP2. Upgrading our gameboy (multi media machine) to SP2 went well as well. It knocked out nero image drive, but the Daemon-tools virtual CD/DVD still works well. There is an issue with that when installing SP2, my neighbour's tip solved that.
The blues, even worse it was mood indigo, came with the upgrade of my development machine. I had a backup of all essential files and jumped in. This is what happened
- Started the setup
- Setup failed and rolled back the installation
- Machine rebooted
- Windows starts and the explorer crashes leaving me with a machine without an UI
I hadn't read this yet and tried fixing it the usual way with windows setup. On MSDN there is a setup which includes sp1. Usally running repair from setup fixes everything. Without any loss of settings. This time I had no luck at all. The setup went well but when rebooting the screen turned blue. Several attempts with the recovery console were unfruitfull. As a last resort I tried a repair with a XP first edition setup. Same result, machine is gone. Installed a fresh copy of Windows. All my files were still there, no need to go for the backup. The first thing I installed was sp2. Without a glitch.
The setup faillure may have been my own “fault”. On the machine was a SQL(sp3) installation and I'm not sure if I shut it down before starting the upgrade. The combination of SQL server and SP2 is often mentioned as troublesome. But not in the setup part. Which is exactly where I slipped. Running SP2 is not the problem, the setup is flaky. The MS knowledge base article is reported here not to solve this.
Installing a fresh instance of Windows never harms. In nearly 2 years the machine had collected an enormous amount of software, this is a chance to see what I really need. This time I'm going for a different approch. Instead of installing SQL and IIS I'm going to run a virtual server. Virtual PC running small bussiness server 2003. My development machine will be far cleaner and the webserver is now portable. Also on the machine were Delphi 5 and 6 installments with loads of add-ons. Getting all that right will be the worst part of the trip. Two more virtual machines coming up.
Peter