I don't need help for this one. Just sympathy. Yesterday, my wife calls me and says her three-year-old Dell laptop is booting up directly into a blue screen of death and complaining about not finding NTLDR. Uggh. I say "just leave it off and I'll fix it later." I was working on it basically from 3pm through 1am with a break for dinner.

- It never blue-screened for me. When it booted, it said it had trouble booting before and offered me "safe mode."

- Unlike last year, when her hard drive died and I was able to extract the image and put it onto a new drive, this time I decided to go for a complete reinstall.

- Since I didn't trust Windows to write its files out to a USB hard drive, I went with a Ubuntu LiveCD. Nice stuff! It recognized and automounted both the internal and external USB disk, using FUSE and whatnot. Completely painless. It even recognized my wireless card. Ubuntu rocks.

- I used a volume license key and an XP Pro SP2 disk, pre-patched and ready to go, borrowed from the IT staff at work (my wife and I share our employer, who has a site license). Getting XP reinstalled wasn't too hard, but the damn auto-updater didn't quite work right, requiring me to follow some dodgy advice that completely solved the problem.

- Then I had to install all the damn drivers. Dell helpfully lets you punch in your "service tag" and gets you straight to all the files you need, with the exception of their lame DVD playing software. I'm now using VLC for that.

- I switched back to Ubuntu for restoring the files. It seems both faster and less error prone than doing it with Windows.

- The I reinstalled all the applications. Some stuff, like Firefox extensions and Thunderbird mail, all just magically kept working and saw all their state exactly how I left it. iTunes got confused and I had to have it rescan the files. Picasa never found its old state, but it's all soft state anyway. It rescanned the pictures and metadata and came out fine.

To the extent that there's a moral to this story, it's that Ubuntu LiveCDs are a life saver. Out of the box, it just magically worked. Windows XP... anything but.

If the Windows update database gets corrupted then yeah, thats what you have to do. I've never needed to download extra patches and install files though. Turn off service, reboot, clear directory and tell it to rescan should be it...

I suspect the problems I ran into have to do with SP3. I figured, as long as I was starting from scratch, I might as well do the latest of everything. Combine the homebrew SP2 disk with the official SP3 download, and it's not deeply surprising that you could run into a case where Microsoft didn't get test coverage.

The need to download additional drivers and crud from Dell was surprising. By default, Windows was using some kind of unaccelerated graphics driver (scrolling was *slow*), it didn't know how to hibernate the laptop, and it didn't know about the wireless. And the volume buttons didn't work. At least Dell had everything in one place where it was easy to get. (And, I had the forethought to download all of that stuff *before* I wiped the machine...)

Still, based on my Ubuntu experience, I could say that the only thing standing between Linux and being a standard desktop operating system is a supported port of Microsoft Office. Not that Microsoft would ever dare do such a thing, but that would give a lot of people all the reason they'd ever need to leave Windows behind, once and for good.

Windows XP SP2 was released in August of 2004. And drivers included in it are likely even older since the SP had to be locked down at some point for full testing. So it's not surprising that a lot of basic things didn't work. Odds are, chipset drivers and such were not in SP2, and so it was running in real basic mode on nearly everything.

I really wish Microsoft was better about releasing service packs more often, and including better drivers with them. The base Windows XP driver cab (August 2001) is 73 megs, SP2 tacked on 18 more megs, and SP3 23 megs worth.

It's also a shame Vista SP1 can't be slipstreamed into a base Vista disk. Hopefully SP2 will restore that functionality, whenever it comes out.

And Apple too needs to improve this mess with their patches. While their combo updater is handy, they offer no official way to slipstream it into the base install DVDs. The time wasted by IT people patching new installs must be massive compared to the work it would take to get the OS providers to update this stuff better.