Day 485: "Fun" with Windows
Jul. 13th, 2021 11:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeLast week our IT director asked us all to make sure all of our home computers were current with Windows updates, for some security reason. My laptop's fine, but my desktop claimed it hadn't installed updates since 2018. At 1:16 pm, I told J. that it said it had "64 important updates," so I told it to go ahead. Around 3 pm it informed me it was at "Stage 3 of 3" and was configuring the updates. It just sat there like that for a very long time. Soon after 4:30 pm, I tried ctrl-alt-del, as a website I found online full of tech people said some update that caused this problem could be interrupted that way. But there was no obvious effect from doing so.
At 6:15 pm I gave up on watching it and went outside to read. At some point between then and 7 pm, it made it to a login screen, but I didn't know whether that was from the original updates or my ctrl-alt-del. I logged in, and it sat at "Welcome" for quite a while, then eventually gave me a black screen with an alarming message down in the corner: "Windows 7 / Build 7601 / This copy of Windows is not genuine." Whee!
I found a web page with instructions to fix that, which it claimed were "quick and easy," but clearly they were not. In any case, there was no option for me to do anything, so I gave up and pressed the power button until it powered down.
I started the computer again, and this time it returned to "Stage 3 of 3" (so the previous detour had probably been caused by the ctrl-alt-del). This time, though, it added that it was at 37%! And the percent kept getting larger! And at 9:12 pm it was again at a login screen... but this time it worked!
So it took only 8 hours. I have no idea whether that was all of the updates it had queued - I'm kind of chicken to look. Maybe tomorrow.
At 6:15 pm I gave up on watching it and went outside to read. At some point between then and 7 pm, it made it to a login screen, but I didn't know whether that was from the original updates or my ctrl-alt-del. I logged in, and it sat at "Welcome" for quite a while, then eventually gave me a black screen with an alarming message down in the corner: "Windows 7 / Build 7601 / This copy of Windows is not genuine." Whee!
I found a web page with instructions to fix that, which it claimed were "quick and easy," but clearly they were not. In any case, there was no option for me to do anything, so I gave up and pressed the power button until it powered down.
I started the computer again, and this time it returned to "Stage 3 of 3" (so the previous detour had probably been caused by the ctrl-alt-del). This time, though, it added that it was at 37%! And the percent kept getting larger! And at 9:12 pm it was again at a login screen... but this time it worked!
So it took only 8 hours. I have no idea whether that was all of the updates it had queued - I'm kind of chicken to look. Maybe tomorrow.