PCTips Box

Microsoft is gearing up for the next stage in the delivery of its first service pack for Windows Vista. The Redmond company has confirmed officially that the automatic distribution of Vista SP1 is just around the corner. Still, at this point in time, the deadline for the debut of Vista SP1’s serving through Automatic Updates has not been made public. Microsoft has stated all along that it plans to start the distribution of Vista SP1 through AU by mid-April, but offered no additional information to pinpoint the release.

Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, concomitantly with the gold version of Windows Server 2008. Only on March 18 did Microsoft manage to make the service pack available to end users via Windows Update and the Download Center. At that time, the Redmond company only released the English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese language versions of Vista SP1. (more…)

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 might very well deliver users from the Reduced Functionality Mode black screen of death kill switch, but the prerequisite updates for the service pack are doing a wonderful job at cutting access to the operating system. Following Microsoft’s monthly patch cycle non-security updates released on February 12, 2007, containing two of the remaining prerequisite updates for Vista SP1, Vista users began complaining about installation failures. Some Vista machines, after the implementation of updates via Automatic Updates are thrown in an infinite reboot loop, while stuck on displaying the following message: “Configuring Updates Stage 3 of 3 0% complete. Do not turn off Computer.” (more…)

If you’re running IE 7 on XP SP2, you may get a Webpage cannot be displayed error when trying to access the Web. If so, any of several recent updates to IE 7 may have created a conflict with your antivirus or antispyware security suite. You should check your suite’s configuration to make sure the updated version of IE is still allowed to access the Web, or contact your security vendor for an update, as described in Microsoft KB article 942818.

Over the holidays, I visited my Dad, who was having issues using AOL. Once I removed his 2006-era version of an antivirus program, and updated him to the 2008 version, his system worked perfectly. While his antivirus signatures were being regularly updated via a paid-up subscription, the older version of his application itself was causing the conflict. (more…)