Hard drive died on grandson’s 2011 Dell Inspiron laptop running Windows 7 Home. No problem; I had a few extra good HDs, then I used a Dell Windows-7 Home re-install disk from my 2012 Dell XPS 17. Everything went smoothly. Between the install disk and the Dell support/drivers site, it all looked good with one exception; flashing BIOS to update from A02 to A05 got me a classic blue screen error. Maybe no big deal, I thought, so I proceeded to Windows Update. No Go. “Could not search for new updates”. An error occurred while checking for new updates”. “Code 080072EFE”. I looked up the code, essentially it means “We don’t have a clue, it could be anything”.
In “Services” I made sure BITS and Windows Update were running. They were.
Googling for solutions, I tried (several times) running the Command Lines to stop BITS and Windows Update, the lines with “ren %systemroot software distribution…” then ren %system root\system 32\catroot2…”, then starting BITS and Windows Update. After the “systemroot software dist.” line, the result was “A duplicate file name exists, or the file cannot be found” (whaat?) Also, after entering the line with system root, system 32, and catroot2, the result was “Access denied”. None of that helped, of course.
Next, I ran the Windows 7 era “Windows Update Repair tool. It found a few problems to fix, but – “Unable to fix all issues found”.
I realize Windows 7 is “No longer supported”, but heck, I can re-install Windows XP and get updates. Getting desperate, I turned the computer’s clock back to 2014. That didn’t work either.
Been working on this for 3 days. I’m officially at wit’s end. I’m considering wiping it and using a Microsoft Win.7 Home install disk (if I have one somewhere) or maybe go right to Windows 10. Nothing to lose but more hours.
Any ideas what the heck is wrong?
