Maximum PC

I have a friends HP Pavilion that was full of everything bad imaginable....his antivirus ran out. I used the Restore disks from the factory to reinstall the OS and it did. It was SP1 version, so I loaded SP2, now I have a blue screen telling me not to touch the pc until system prep is done....that was last night. How do you stop this pieces of crap from running? I can see and use the programs menu but anything I open goes behind the blue screen and I can't use the program...msconfig in this case to shut off the stupid system prep program!

Any ideas to kill this program? I can't even get into Safe Mode, the same message pops up that system prep cannot run in Safe Mode and restarts the computer. BAH!!

Nasty

PS, this pc is for a home bound friend that uses it for everything...banking buying food ectra.

I would nuke the drive and start again. Do you have a spare copy of 7 you can give him? If not, go install Vista SP! and try again.

Thanks for the reply. I got it running and here is what I did:

Installed Vista using the two HP install disks and let the setup program they script run its course...three hours later.

Finally got into windows! The first thing I did was uninstall anything remotely HP in nature! Then I uninstalled Nortons security suite which crashed while uninstalling ...but finished anyway...go figure. Then I uninstalled everything Smymantic in nature as well.

Next I went into Start by using msconfig and killed anything HP and Symantic/Nortons including the HP script which they don't list with a HP header...basterds! Make damn sure that one is disabled or sp2 won't install!!!

Once I installed SP2 and it finished I installed Ccleaner and ran the registry section to clean up the system.

Then I rebooted and started Windows Update which is still installing. I also gave him Microsoft Security Essentials for virus protection.

The reason I am going through all this updating and such ...is he is still on dialup and he has cable in the house...try to convince a 86 year old he should upgrade...LOL

I hope the above procedure helps someone.

Consider this post closed.

Nasty

Heh. My granddad still uses 98SE. The only reason he upgraded his printer last year was because we couldn't fix the old one. You're lucky you got yours up to Vista!