Windows XP, the Blue Screen of Death and Activation Hell

My home computer running Windows XP has been getting less and less stable recently. Generally it’s been fairly stable (for Windows), requiring a reboot about once a week to keep it working. However in the last couple of weeks it really went badly down hill, categorised by windows explorer crashing, and the computer rebooting itself. Before windows XP these reboots would have manifested in the famous Blue Screen of Death, but Windows XP is now set to automatically reboot when this happens. I’m not sure whey the operating system became unstable, one thing that seams to coincide with it becoming unstable was a windows update, that failed. It didn’t give any information why it failed, but that one of the updates it tried to install didn’t install.

This took some time to get resolved, and once again the post is too long to have within the blog. So I’ve included it in it’s own page. The full story.