The Joy of working with Microsoft Windows XP

My sister Judy, wanted to video phone with her Granddaughter Emily the way I video phone with my daughter, Patti anne. It's a neat thing really. Set up a web cam, connect through Windows Messenger and have an unlimited, free talk with your loved one. The neat part is seeing them live on screen.
Now when I first installed it at home, I installed the Logitech software, connected the camera and logged into Windows messenger. Boom on line and on screen. No problems. Maybe 10 minutes. Hooray for Windows Vista! I try to do the same with Judy and unfortunately ran into the first error message. Windows XP must be upgraded to Service Pack 2. Ok, we go to Microsoft's upgrade and try to upgrade. Now the fun begins. First of all they said she needed 74 different upgrades. Ok so we say go ahead. An hour later we're finished installing all 74 upgrades and try to install the web cam. Nope, still need to upgrade Windows XP to Service Pack 2. So back we go and the first thing I notice is that the computer has slowed considerably. Hmmm what to do? I started checking various things out and realize that there's all kinds of different problems. Well, previously I noted that the fan to her power supply tends to whine at times and a bad fan can do really bad things to a mother board so i decided that she should have it checked out and since she had virtually no personal stuff in her computer, lets do a reinstall of the operating system and start fresh.
The next day we're back, everything is running fine and really quick so we figure it was a good step. Perhaps we had managed to download a corrupted file? maybe there was a glitch while downloading? Who knows. So let's install this web cam and get on with our life. No way, the tech didn't give us SP 2! Ok, let's do it, nope there's 74 files to be downloaded again. Damn I didn't put put SP 2 on the list for the tech. Dummy me. So we download it all and go on to SP 2. Try to find it. Ha! After a bit I allowed the Windows upgrade to search for required upgrades and eventually it found SP 2. So now we download it and no problem. Success at last.
Wait, after we successfully install the web cam and start Microsoft Messenger , it says they require an upgraded version of Windows Messenger. Ok, so we find the Messenger upgrade and wait for it to download and install. We start the new Messenger and get an error message that we need the current upgrade. Click here. Hmmm so we click on the here and downloading it comes. After another 20 minutes we finish and try it out - wow everything works. Now to test it. Judy calls Chris, her daughter and her son-in-law, Joe answers and says Chris is not home AND their computer is down. Tee hee what next?
So I go home and use my system to call Judy and another problem arises. Unfortunately Judy isn't computer literate enough to help so back I go. Just a bit of tweaking the web cam software. I now try "calling" myself. It rings but of course there's no one to answer so back home I go.
Voila after what seemed to be 6 - 8 hours we succeed! No one better ask me to help install a web cam again! I'm done unless they use Vista.