My laptop (XPS 1645) died because of the HDD crashed and became unreadable. I recently replaced the drive with a SDD drive. I do not have access to the original software reloads that originally came with the laptop when I bought it. It's in a 15'x10' storage unit inside a box that has been shifted around multiple times so finding it could take a long, long time.

I reloaded with Win7 (was previously Vista on old system). There was a bit of a chore finding all the drivers and, truthfully, there are still missing drivers in the hardware profiles even though the hardware works fine (supposedly).

I upgraded from Win7 Home Premium to Professional, loaded all the main drivers I could find and began loading the Win7 updates using Windows Update. I was trying to get to the point where I can update to SP1 but have to go through the optional updates to be able to do it, apparently. There are many, many optional updates (20 or so). I did a fire and forget but apparently one or more of the updates brick my computer. It took me a re-install to figure this out.

I am at this point again (2nd re-install). At first I tried to load the updates in small groups that didn't look dangerous and that started working. The last group I selected, bricked my computer, thus the now 2nd re-install.

I went into Safe Mode and uninstalled all the updates I could and tried to login to no avail. There were two updates I could not uninstall. I wrote them down but I came here hoping I could find a faq or news article or another person who had a warning of which update not to load or if there were a certain order in which to load the updates.

Previous to loading the last group of updates, Win7 SP1 appeared as an update but all attempts resulted in failure to update with it. This is why I loaded that last group of updates. I'm hoping one of the updates I could not uninstall were one of the problems and I'd like to know which one so I can load the other without having to reload Win7 again. It's a bit of work for trial and error... and this is if one of the updates I was able to uninstall didn't leave something after the uninstall that is causing the problem.

Any help would be very thankful. If anyone needs computer specs I can but may need to know what you want to know and how exactly to find the info. I'm not completely computer illiterate but these newer (Vista +) Win OSs make it difficult for me to find info sometimes. They are not as intuitive as XP or maybe I was just very used to XP.