Today I got my laptop out of hibernation in its case for the first time since late June. It still had 10% left in the battery. It woke up into Windows 8, and I restarted and booted into Windows 7 Pro. I knew that I was several updates behind, and wanted to get that squared away, do a defrag, and create a fresh drive image.
There were 72 updates (Windows and Office 2010 combined). I clicked install, went back to my desktop PC. A while later I checked, and the updates had failed – all of them. So I tried again, but got the same result. There was an error code, and I clicked on “More details” to see this:
There is very little information on error code 80243004, but on technet there are some strange referrences to the size of the System Tray having an effect. I checked the System Tray, and sure enough it was a lot bigger than usual, icons randomly scattered around. I clicked on “Customize”, then put a check in the box to put all the icons on the Taskbar. Then I went back through, and set the System Tray like I had it previously.
I ran Windows Update again, and everything worked just like it should. All updates installed successfully. I ran sfc /scannow, and it reported that it had successfully repaired corrupted files. Perhaps that was the problem, corrupted files having to do with Windows Update, but I didn’t think to run sfc until after.
I proceeded with my defrag, and I’m now updating the Windows 8 installation on my laptop so I can defrag and create a fresh image for it, too.
