Hanging Related To Updates

Working on a Toshiba Satellite A205-S4617, using Windows Vista Home Premium. It started out with hangtime -- a lot of hangtime. With anything that put a little stress on the system: music, games, movies were all useless to me now. Even web browsing was a chore, with a 15-second hangtime for each web page opened -- sometimes twice (much worse on the graphics-heavy sites). The system was also extremely slow retrieving files on the hard disk. I didn't know what to do for several months until I narrowed the cause down to the Windows Update Error 80070426. Based on advice to other people with similar problems that I found here and other places, I took the following steps: I made sure my copy of Vista was re-authenticated, then I tried installing the updates again. No luck.

The next option was to restore my machine to the factory settings. This could be accomplished rather easily with the system restore disk that came with the computer. Except that during my last move, the wife thought the computer box would make nice storage for drinking glasses, and promptly emptied the contents of the box. That stuff has not been seen or heard from since. Whenever I describe my computer woes to somebody and they ask why I don't just restore it with the backup disk, I just give the wife a hard stare and shake my head a little, saying nothing.
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