Digital BW, The Print

On 24 Sep 2004 at 4:06, Barrett Benton wrote:

> 
> I think hte issue revolves around the seeming blind belief in the 
> Service Packs doing nothing but good.  An IT outfit that 
> occasionally hires me for the odd bit of Mac work that comes 
> their way (right, I don't "do" Windows at home, but sometimes 
> help others who do) has categorically advised *against* the XP 
> SP2 on account of numerous problems they've encountered - 
> hey, it's their bread-and-butter, not mine (at least not directly), 
> although I've dealt enough with XP (among other Windows 
> flavors) to know not to go blindly down the path of each and every 
> "fix" (there's a reason why I think Win 2000 Pro might have been 
> Windows at its peak). 
> 


I have been in IT for over 20 years, and the rules are simple when it comes to 
updates, never apply any change that you can not reverse out, if it does not work.

That means you backup everything in the Windows directory, including the registry, 
the problem is that when Windows starts it locks the registry files for exclusive write 
access, meaning that your restore program can not overwrite the now FUBAR 
registry.  You need to copy out the registry in another format OR use another 
operating system that is not registry dependant to do the backup and restore. 
Hopefully you don't have boot problems.  A good program to have on hand, is one 
of the run-off-the-CD Linux versions, boot that, do your backup onto other media, 
like a CD-RW or DVD-RW, then you can always boot that, to do the restore.

The other thing, is that every installation of Windows, is slightly different, for a 
example a  machine that has Photoshop installed is different from one that does 
not.  

W