well, thanks to the help of a friend, i have java reinstalled now but it's version 7u80 (not sure how helpful that'll be after a while since the newest is 8 70 something i think).

thing is, before uninstalling and reinstalling this older version, it wouldn't update or work at all. tried the online installer, as well as both the 32 and 64 bit offline installers to no success.

what would happen is i'd (and i confirmed this via task manager) start each installer and then...nothing. when i checked task manager each time, the installer processes were there but they would just suddenly drop to 0 CPU and that's it.

i first ran into this problem when i went to http://keepvid.com/ to download a video and it redirected me to java's update page. anyone else had this problem and if so, any solutions?

i'm using windows 7 64-bit

I recognize this problem, because this happened to me a couple of months ago when I tried to upgrade Java on my brand new Windows 8.1 laptop (64-bit).

Since I just bought the laptop and didn't have any personal files on it, I decided to reset Windows and then install Java, which solved my problem.

I don't think I've ever tried to uninstall any old Java versions before installing an update prior to that incident, since I always do that after the upgrade, but the thought of that being the cause sounds too ridiculous to be true.