>To put this into perspective... I'm into week #2 of my NT workstation not working. I went thru a series of NT4 re-installs, in the middle of that I had SP4, but when all was said & done I got rolled back to SP3. So now my DCOM stuff is hosed and C000005 errors are a noose around my neck.
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>So ok, I've seen enough hassles that I feel a little more confident in tackling SP4 update myself. I pulled down a NT4 SP4 folder from our network, including subfolders for i386, mdac, msie401, and ssx. I'm looking at the readme file and now I'm not so confident I should do this myself (I dont know a whole lot about NT unfortunately). The "before you install recommendations" state I should make a backup copy of my registry... how do I do that? It also suggests I disable any nonessential third-party drivers and services,I looked at the services applet in Control Panel, but I'm not sure what's non-essential.

FWIW, the majority of problems I've run into with SP4 installs have involved sound boards and video cards. I've gotten in the habit of starting up NT with the generic VGA drivers rather than the specific drivers for my video card when applying SP4. You can also do without Active Desktop and your Screen Saver while the upgrade is running.

Backing up your regiustry - if nothing else, you can export your registry with REGEDIT to a (probably humungous) .REG file. NTbackup can make a registry backup, as can most third-party backup utilities. Better, make a full system backup before you start applying SP4, so that you can get back to where you are that much faster. A number of packages are available that will shoot an image backup of your drive to tape or a network drive (Adaptec's EZ SCSI 5 includes an Image backup that will allow you to restore a disk image from a DOS reovery disk. Iomega's Ditto software for NT offers a similar option, as do products like ImageCast and Ghost.)

If you have IE4 on your system, bring it up to 4.01 SP1 before running the SP4 install.

Run RDISK, and update your Emergency Repair Disk with it. RDISK creates the 'Last Known Good Profile' used during recovery, and where NT discovers that the registry or system files are horribly frobbed...

SP4 gives you the option of creating an Uninstall directory. Do it.

If you can, defragment your drives before installing the Service Pack (Diskeeper does a good job, and the 'lite' version is availble for free.)

Good luck!

Ed

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>I also heard rumor that there is a SmartUpdate deal for this on the M$ website... maybe I should go that route?
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>TIA!!