[CliffordK]

Trying to get Windows 7, SP1 updated on a friend's computer.

It keeps giving me a "File Not Found" error.

One would think the MSFT Engineers would have thought to tell one WHICH file is not found.  Perhaps even give one a chance to find the missing file, rather than automatically uninstalling all the updates that it just took an hour to install.

I found a file called "Microsoft Fixit", but it did not seem to fix anything.
I then tried "System Update Readiness Tool for Windows 7", a 300MB package (after I got the right version, all web links I found took me to the wrong version, and the MSFT download page didn't direct me to the right one).

One of the other annoying things is that MSFT has these nice progress bars that don't really seem to move at all.  So, it might be stuck in one place for a half an hour.  The Task Manager shows activity, so I have to assume it is doing Something.   

I realize that the Mac Model is to hide everything from the end user.  But, that assumes everything works as it should, which isn't always the case (with either PCs or Macs).  There has to be a good balance between providing too much information and too little information.

[Geezer]

Had a similar situation yesterday. Mrs G wanted to transfer her domain name to a different hosting service.

It all seemed clear enough. All we had to do was change the DNS addresses at the site that issued her domain name, but every time we did it, it would say it had done it and it was now "ready", but nothing had actually happened! After a couple of hours of this, reading all the help and FAQs etc, I gave it one last try. Now it came back with "no can do - it's locked"
or something along those lines.

We go to the other site, and it had finally worked!

I think there was a lot of chit-chat going on behind the scenes that makes the whole process take a bit of time. If the user interface had simply said "Check back in a couple of hours" all would have been well.

No doubt, those familiar with the process know it takes quite a while, but how the heck were we to know that if they didn't tell us - sheesh!

[CliffordK]

Whew,
I finally got the SP installed.

http://beerpla.net/2011/05/06/how-to-fix-error_not_found-0x80070490-during-windows-7-sp1-installation/

Anyway, after getting quite a few wrong turns, (including worthless help pages on the MSFT site), I finally found something that actually did something with a good explanation.,

It would have been a lot quicker had MSFT actually chosen to give more informative error messages, and spent some time to describe what to fix, rather than try another "everything script" that would take hours top test, and invariably do nothing.