Posts by Matt Ewing

HP begs AMD PC owners to put XP SP3 on ice

Not so fast

The easy fix that you offered does not work. The intelppm driver was never active in my registry to begin with, so it doesn't have any effect on my Presario in enabling me to install SP3.

If it worked for you, then consider yourself extremely lucky. Most of us trying to get SP3 installed have already seen the BS about the intelppm driver and the quick fixes to disable it. There is more to the uninstallable SP3 issue than the intelppm driver alone.

I have seen other tech reports stating that this issue was raised by MS four years ago when the SP2 update was issued. However, it should be noted that a substantial number of XP users have long since had to reinstall XP on either a reformatted or replacement drive. I would wonder if this has any bearing on whether the SP3 update will take.

HP patch 37394 is a joke

I found the HP patch that was supposed to allow users of Presario laptops with AMD chips using XP Home SP2 while logged in as Administrator to enable their machines to accept the SP3 update from Microsoft.

I downloaded the HP update, ran it, and encountered the plain error message that the update failed because I did not meet the minimum requirements! Let's see... I have a Presario with an AMD cpu, and am using XP Home while logged in as an admin... all exactly as specified by HP... and the damn patch doesn't work. Gee, was I supposed to stand on one foot and whistle "Dixie" while attempting the update, or what?

HP support is in over its head with this and tells me one line of BS after another. The intelppm is not even mentioned in the registry, so all of their dumb disablement fixes don't even apply. Their suggestion to delete the intelppm driver from the Windows directory is equally futile; Windows immediately replicates the deleted or renamed driver in the same folder.

Anyone using their online chat tech help system needs to be aware of a quirk in the Cisco Caller chat program used by HP: it will automatically drop you after a few minutes if there is no activity. If your tech is off looking up something, then be sure to enter something (a period or a space) in the chat box and press ENTER to keep the session alive. If your session is dropped, then you will need to repeat everything all over again to the next tech when you go through the hoops to reestablish your chat.