Windows Vista "Forever Loop" Fix.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

From DU'er paupau:

“Configuring Updates Stage 3 of 3 0%” Vista forever loop cure

“Configuring Updates Stage 3 of 3 0%”

Use your OS disk to access the Vista repair tools.

Even for those without an OS disc, Vista has repair tools built in.

To access them, boot the computer, but when you see the “Microsoft (C)” with the moving lines, hold the power button until it shuts down.

Now windows thinks it didn’t boot properly, and when you turn it back on, you should get the option to run Windows Startup Repair.

Choose this. When it loads, cancel the scan it starts (it won’t find anything anyway), and choose the text on the bottom that says something like “Show advanced repair options.” which should get you to a command prompt option. (Some folks are saying that it asked for the user, and they changed from the Administrator to their user account in order to get access to a few more tools, including a command prompt where you can run fixes).

You can also get to a command prompt via holding down, or repeatedly clicking, F8 as the computer begins its reboot. - select safe with command line.

note that this may take a few runs through the reboot F8 routine as my initial runs still ended up with the forever loop. Which is why the OS disk route - if your machine came with or you later bought such a disk - is preferred. If you are lucky ebough to have a restore point established, that option appears to work on a little less than half the machines I've run into.


Once you have the command prompt the need is to remove a file “pending.xml” that is causing the forever loop

Instead of deleting the “pending.xml” files from the c:\windows\winsxs folder I renamed it, so that it can be put back later if needed.

This seemed to do the trick for me. But if it still hangs on "Stage 3 at 0%" with reboot and hang again forever cycle continuing, just do a repeat of the F8, and select safe mode w/networking. Stage 3 may well continue and finish normally (it didn't for me) but in any case after the second "safe" reboot a boot to normal windows was possible for the folks I was helping.

Any lawyers looking for names for the class action lawsuit against Microsoft can contact me for a few. This was an "automatic update (the default choice when Vista is installed) process" - so no one did anything to mitigate MS's liability - there was no download of beta, or RC1, software initiated by the owners of these machines. Norton/avg anti virus may - or may not - be a factor as MS is indicating the Vista SP1 (which is what MS shoved out the door) "breaks" a few non-MS programs despite MS giving them a Vista certification.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

1. I have a better solution

Reinstall XP.

:shrug:

[RoyGBiv]

2. Yeah ...

Linux is just far too complicated...

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Yup.

No anti-virus programs? Check.

No anti-spyware programs? Check.

No anti-malware programs? Check.

No anti-trojan programs? Check.

No BHO's? Check.

No Drive Cleaner utilities? Check.

No Registry Cleaner utilities? Check.

No Registry to get borked? Check.

No Defragging? Check.

Basically, no maintenance programs to run at all? Check.

Linux just runs and does what you need? Check.

Yup, Desktop Linux is definitely too complicated for the average user.

[madokie]

4. is that saying there is no need for any of that or does that mean there is no programs to do those

chores with? I was trying to make a switch to linux but for now I've been sidetracked with nlite and having more fun than ought to be legal I'm a thinking. Much of what xp offers is not used by me so I have been removing parts and I can tell a difference in the speed of my computer. I started on dos 3.1 and a 286 processor when they first came out and so I still go back to the dos window to do some things, in fact I resisted switching to windows until win98 and I finally did make the switch because I bought a new machine and didn't have drivers to work in dos so I accepted 98 and now I'm on a highly modified xp home. side by side comparisons with xp and linux mint and puppy on how fast I can open web pages and places like this one here the xp running ie7 is much faster than with linux running firefox or puppy with seamonkey. A couple years ago I spent a few days comparing ie7 and firefox on this box and after that I am an ie7 user because it caused less hassles plus was so much faster in surfing the web. Time is part of what its all about to me. anyways is all them things you listed not really needed or ??? I'm thinking the speed difference between the two operating systems is probably something to do with the way I have linux set up but right now I am not edumaycated enough to figure out how to make the changes that probably needs made.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

5. All the things that I listed...

Are really not needed. The anti-virus programs offered for Linux are really for use in a mail server cluster or something like that. You do not really need them on a desktop system.

Now, considering all the things that you don't need to do to Linux, which OS is better for the average user who just wants to get things done?

[madokie]

6. no doubt about it, Linux

its just a little hard for me to make the transition is all as I have to first unlearn. Back in my work days I was always much happier to work with a newbie that knew nothing of what we were doing as one who came in thinking they knew it all. My plan is that this copy of xp I own now will be the last money I give micro$haft ever as my intention is to make the switch to a Linux based OS ultimately but right now I'm having so much fun with modifying xp that Linux has taken a back seat to it.

[RoyGBiv]

7. Speed ...

I still have an inkling that one of your speed problems may be related to your graphics driver.

Short story ... well, as short as they get from me anyway. :)

The very first installation I did of Linux on my home system was some variation of Red Hat, and it SUCKED because of how slow it was. It sucked so bad I didn't try again until someone talked me into using SuSE, which I think was at 9.1 then. Same problem, only worse. But instead of just giving up, I looked around a bit and realized the problem may well have been my ATI graphics card and the fact that ATI does not work and play well with Linux -- more so back then than now, but still a problem. After much trial and error, I finally got the proprietary ATI Linux driver installed, and it solved the problem. Haven't looked back since.

There are two kinds of speed at issue here. (There are more than that really, but I'm trying to simplify.) One is basically the efficiency with which your system runs the operating system itself, the other how efficiently it runs the window manager, which runs on top of the OS. Both Gnome and KDE, the two most popular window managers for Linux, are resource hogs. They're getting better in some ways, worse in others. KDE is the worst overall, and KDE 4.0, when it comes into common use, may be a killer on older systems without mid- high-end graphics cards and gobs of memory. One problem is all the eye candy, but that's not nearly all of it. (This is similar to the problems with Vista and all its eye-candy.)

What was happening in my case was slow startup times for stuff like web browsers, lots of caching when I had more than a couple windows open at a time, trails across the screen when I moved windows, etc. It's the same thing you'd seen on a Windows system if you never installed a graphics driver for your card. When I got 3d acceleration enabled with my ATI card, all that went away. I've never been able to *look* at my Windows box since and think it runs faster, even though it does under some circumstances, e.g. games, 3d graphics intensive drawings, etc. The underlying system runs quite a bit faster on the same machine.

KDE tries too hard to *be* Windows, and Gnome tries too hard to be OS X. They try so hard that they throw in stuff trying to one-up (or three-up) a Windows GUI. All that can be tweaked (and proper installation of a graphics driver helps a lot), but with most distros I've tried that aren't built around the do-it-yourself philosophy, the default installation of either will be perceived to be slower than a Windows installation on the same machine.

Lots of other Windows managers exist, some easier to use and/or install than others, and many of them tend to be more streamlined, allowing the perception of more speed.

[madokie]

8. I have a radeon card I believe it is

and all the distros I've tried doesn't seem to have a problem with it. I think one aspect that may be making a difference is I am running a barebones xp that I've spent a lot of time on tweaking and getting it pretty right, or at least for me and that may be what is at play here. I'm only loading antivirus at startup and have turned off many of the services that so far I haven't needed and only the addon I've actually needed and not the ones I haven't needed yet. There can be some performance gains to be had there. Believe it or not sun java was a big waster of time. I disabled it a few weeks back and then on this iteration of xp I have loaded now I didn't install java at all and so far I haven't been told I need it by anything I do. But back when I was playing with it I would disabled it and go about my merry way and then enable it and I could definitely tell a difference. Another I found to be a slowpoke generator for my machine was IE7 pro extension. I never suspected it to be any reason to slow anything down so I never thought about it but this last time I waited a while, actually I forgot, before I installed it and as soon as I did I noticed that ie was slower in opening pages so I now don't have it loaded on my machine at all. You have to understand this is a highly hacked, actually manerized is my word for it, version of xp I have now and I think that is why it works so well. Right now I'm in the process of evaluating prefetcher and so far the jury is still out but it may be getting tossed too as since I've re enabled it this morning I haven't seen any performance increases yet. What I wish I had was a good free program to benchmark my system with. back in the dos days I had one but its been too long ago for me to remember what is was but I found back then that I could make a ramdisk in the extra 384 meg of ram I had at the time and copy autocad 10 to it via my batch file and it sure made autocad faster, maybe thats where I got the bug for playing around with the os, I don't know. Let me just say this, it is not unusual for me to purchase a product and bring it home and immediately take it apart and change something about it so as to make it work better for me. Many of my family and friends back through the years have had me manerize products for them too. Anyways when I take on the big task of getting serious about learning linux I will be asking you many questions as you indicated to me once that you would be willing to hold my hand somewhat. Yep, damn near 60 years old and still taking things apart and changing them for the better for me is me.

Dell dimension 4700 with 3 gig processor with hyperthreading turned on, a 128 meg video card, soundblaster live, 160 gig hd with 2 gig of system ram
'bout forgot I have pagefile turned off too with no problems so far. Even with 2 gig of ram the hd light would still be coming on like it was being used for pagefile duty where now it doesn't seem to do that at all.

Back in the early days with my first 20 meg harddrive it would sound like a thrashing machine so I figured that anything that made that much noise must be wearing out and sure enough I went through two of them so thats where I'm coming from in turning off pagefile. I figure this hd has only just so many read write cycles in its lifetime that if I cut down on the times its reading writing and seeking the longer it has to last. oh well, I guess its time for me to go back to my going crazy, ;-)

Hoping you are having a great day

[RoyGBiv]

9. I remember you mentioning Radeon ...

That's what made me think of this.

Let me ask, did you install the proprietary ATI driver? If you don't know, you didn't, 'cause it can be a pain in the butt. If not, your distro probably defaulted to using the standard VESA driver, which works fine for the most part, but you won't be using the gl extensions or hardware acceleration. Memory management may be screwed up, etc. I used to have a list of all the things that didn't work right if the prop. driver wasn't installed, but I seem to have lost it.

Anyway ... I won't beat the point to death. When you get back around to messing with it, let me know.

As for what you've done with your XP system, all that certainly would make a difference. I have mine tweaked, but not *that* tweaked. :-) It's really just the same thing with Linux. If you're not building from scratch, you're dealing with what someone else, or some group, decided was important. For major distros that are trying to appeal to everyone, that results in a lot of bloat.

Happy manerizing. (good word)

P.S. One day, you'll be compiling you're own custom kernels. That's where the serious tweaking begins, and if you aren't crazy now, you will be. Oh, you. will. be. ;-)

[madokie]

10. oops, been caught. No I didn't do that and I'm not sure how to do it.

It very well may be the deal and I will see if I can figure out how to do it. Thanks for the help and most of all the encouragement as thats really what matters most.

[Gore1FL]

13. You can download one from the ATI site

They update them often enough that what they have is likely more current than what you have already.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

11. Straight up:

After a lot of experience with various systems running Linux, I can say that, quite honestly, Nvidia has its shit far more together when it comes to Linux "drivers". When I am building a Linux system or dual boot, I always go with an Nvidia card, starting with the older FX series of cards. They always work, except, in the case of my 8800 GT, the things was so bleeding-edge, that the Linux drivers have yet to be released. They were, a month later and they just...worked.

You ought to see Mandriva 2008 x86_64 Desktop on a Quad-Core Intel with 4 GB of RAM and an 8800 GT. It goes beyond "scream". Windows doesn't come close to utilising the 4 cores with anywhere near the speed and efficiency.

[RoyGBiv]

12. Ditto on Nvidia ...

I'd been with ATI since the 7xxx series, but after dealing with their utter lack of real support for Linux after a lot of empty promises, I bolted. The capper for me was their AiW functionality, which they didn't support at all for Linux. At some point they put a link to one of the OpenSource projects that will get most of the cards to work, and it was incorporated into Xorg 7.0, but the video capture still doesn't work correctly on the 9600XT AiW, which is what I had.

I got an Nvidia 7600GT a year and a half or so ago. Couldn't be simpler dealing with this, and no mucking around with xorg.conf was required either. Nvidia was nice enough to put out a script that does much of that for you *correctly*. ATI's so-called xorg wizard overwrote the whole damn file and killed my somewhat exotic mouse settings. Thankfully I *did* have a backup, but it was still irritating. Only bright side to the whole experience was I learned a lot of what *not* to do with xorg. :-)

I compile the NVidia drivers "by hand" because I'm so used to it its easier for me, but I hear tell they even have packages that work out the need to recompile manually when the kernel upgrades.