error 80070490

Desertfox, I have checked my computer and it tells me SP1 is in use, but there is no update SP1 that has been installed. The installation is OEM, so I think the SP1 was already in the installation, not added. The link from Langa is 2011, so I imagine installs then did not come with SP1 and were installed later. If originally installed, SP1 can not be removed. Have any idea how one could tell if a disk had SP1 on it so this disk might be used in this clean install? We are fortunate at our church to have a computer person who does all the computer stuff there -- not self trained but does this stuff in his "day Job" -- and when I told him what I was trying to do he said it could not be done. I sent him the link for him to look at it. One issue with this fellow is he does not know how to explain things -- he can do them, and does not like it when someone questions him -- so he may not be helpful. Most people at the church have had him build computers for them, so if they have a disk from him with the SP1 on it, maybe it would work. Anyway, I am interested. BTW, I am old enough to have read "Rommel, The Desert Fox," and remember his exploits!! Iimagine you are as good at what you do as he was. Thanks

I never found just what the problem was with not being able to update, but the link related to using a Win7 disk worked for me. A friend of mine works in the IT section of a large company near here and looking at my computer I saw that my OS was Win 7 OEM with SP1 installed, so I needed a disk with this slipstreamed. He got me one and we started the installation. It took 2 3/4 hours to get it installed, then I had about 130 updates that took another couple of hours. He said his company has had many problems with SP1 and in his opinion it was not vetted well before being sent out, but he also mentioned there are some dll files that get "de-registered" sometimes in installation of other software and this really causes problems. One case in particular he remembered was some networking problem they had and none of them could get the thing fixed so they had to do new imaging to get the computers working and networked. Then at a seminar on Java, the presenter casually mentioned that from time to time a certain dll file gets de-registered -- this is my term here -- and when that happens in an installation, the solution is re-registering it. And this was exactly the problem the IT people had never been able to solve. He thought maybe something like this might have been my trouble. Thanks for the WindowsSecret link. He did give me another link, http://support.microsoft.com/fixit/, but we tried that and it did not solmve the problem. Even trying to manually install an update did not work.

Jerry,

First my name Desertfox was taken by me because I live in the desert. I have nothing to do with that General Erwin Rommel (by the way his son became the mayor of the city of Stuttgart in Germany).

Judging your description of the issue with MS Updates points to a very serious problem. Did you try to contact MS as SpywareDr. suggested? I would really do this first before you take any other drastic measure. The drastic measure would be to do a complete reinstall of W 7 from the recovery partition. I do hope you still have that partition on your Lenovo laptop. I always keep that partition even though I make a CD from it. I have a HP desktop with W 7 and laptop with W8 which is an upgrade from W 7.

I did go to that link, and looked at several of the posts related to this error, but I did not submit a question to the administrator. From what I saw there were so many reasons for the possible cause I really did not want to trace them. I did follow one -- scan with sfc, the hotfix download, making a catroot2.old folder, then xcopy catroot2 to it and deleting contents of the catroot2 folder, even going to exporting the contents of the components section of the registry and then trying to find the keys to delete -- they were not there -- and I stopped before I would have registered several dll files. That was when I got your non-invasive method for installing. So far it is good.

I hope I did not offend you with the desertfox talk. Not my intention at all. And thanks for the link. I still have all the partitions on the computer. I would like to get rid of the one with Microsoft office starter in it. Why did they put it in a restricted partition?

Jerry, no you did not offend me at all. I just made my remark to explain why I chose the name, and I did not even think of that General/ Generalfieldmarshall. I am interested in history.

I do hope you would find a solution but my guess is that a complete reinstall is on hands. As it sounds from you there is a lot things coming together and corrupting your laptop.

At this point in time everything seems to be great with my laptop having completed the non-destructive reinstall. I have no idea how MS sets up the codes or what triggers which one, but it seems to me, from looking at all the suggestions for making corrections when the code comes up, that the code needs to be more specific and additional divisions of codes made. If it is a registry entry, or a missing dll, or whatever, but this comes from a novice. But your recommendation, at this time, helped me and my friend said he was not aware that this option was still available. He thought it was removed when Vista came out.

Glad to hear that everything worked out fine. What happened to your laptop is probably anyone's guess. Even if you had used Event Viewer, you probably would not have found a clear unambiguous hint what was going on because the explanations/comments are pretty cryptic. Good luck and no more upsets.