Is Service Pack 2 gonna drive me drive me to Linux?

A few weeks ago my laptop crashed. I brought it back to life by means of a repair installation via the manufacturers recovery disk. Only thing now is it needs service pack 2 and yet the install always fails.

I tried downloading and installing and that didnt work, so I bought SP2 from microsoft and tried from the CD, again with no joy.

So I surfed for answers and got one, the Access is Denied message I receive point to a permissions issue in whichever registry is being updated, just identify the key, change the permissions and try again.

Problem is this, SP2 install is not a 10 minute thing, it normally takes in excess of an hour to get to the point where it fails, and it invariably fails. It then takes another hour (or if not it sure seems like it) to roll back the failed installation.

No matter what key I identify and what permission I change there always seems to be another one that trips up the install. Quite frankly life is too short to chase registry modifications and at this rate support will be over before I ever get SP2 installed.

So unless anyone knows a sure fire way to install SP2 without having format and reinstall the whole thing then I will be Linux bound. I have cobbled together another XP system that I'm in the process of transferring applications and data to so running Linux on the laptop wont lose me anything but surely there has to be an easier way to resolve this?

 

The sure fire method is to reformat, install xp. Then install sp2 before anything else. Personally i have never had any pc install that slow, maybe there are other problems that you are not aware of, bad memory, failing hard drive, just to name a few. ed

 

Hmm, try validating windows again.

http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/default.mspx?displaylang=en