Followup on friend's broken computer

There are only two questions here, both at the very end and no question
about the repair procedure.

I said in passing that I was going to a friend's Sunday to fix his
broken computer. It was a laptop with win7. The message they got when
turned on was
User Profile Service service failed the logon. Cannot be loaded.

I googled that and the first hit was
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215 . Usually I find MS pages
incomprehensible, but this one was clear***. I'd forgotten but my
friend knew that one could get into XP Safe Mode even with this problem
and we used Method 1: Fix the user account profile We renamed two
profiles so the backup was now the regular and the regular was now the
backup, and we changed the regcount and the state on the new regular so
that they were both zero. That's all it took, but read the webpage for
better instructions.

***Except that under step 4, the 3rd and 4th bullet points seem to be
the same as the 1st and 2nd. That's an MS error, right, not some
obscure thing I haven't learned yet????


How does a problem like this happen? My friend closed the computer
normally, afahct, the night before, and the next morning it wouldn't
work???

micky wrote:
There are only two questions here, both at the very end and no question
about the repair procedure.

I said in passing that I was going to a friend's Sunday to fix his
broken computer. It was a laptop with win7. The message they got when
turned on was
User Profile Service service failed the logon. Cannot be loaded.

I googled that and the first hit was
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947215 . Usually I find MS pages
incomprehensible, but this one was clear***. I'd forgotten but my
friend knew that one could get into XP Safe Mode even with this problem
and we used Method 1: Fix the user account profile We renamed two
profiles so the backup was now the regular and the regular was now the
backup, and we changed the regcount and the state on the new regular so
that they were both zero. That's all it took, but read the webpage for
better instructions.

***Except that under step 4, the 3rd and 4th bullet points seem to be
the same as the 1st and 2nd. That's an MS error, right, not some
obscure thing I haven't learned yet????


How does a problem like this happen? My friend closed the computer
normally, afahct, the night before, and the next morning it wouldn't
work???

Some faults on computers are Microsoft's fault.

Some are poorly written third party programs.

And the rest are malware. Imagine how predictable
the computer problems would be, without the presence
of malware.

Things can be damaged on a computer, by a fault
in the storage device. But that's hardly ever the
root cause, as hard drives have automatic sector
substitution, and the bad cluster mechanism isn't
going to get too much usage before the hard drive
stops for good. Checking the SMART stats on the hard
drive, should be one of your steps when doing maintenance.
Just in case. The previous brand of drives I was using,
were only lasting one year.

Paul