SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard "Configuration Failed"

Ever spent a full day (or more) trying to get SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard to work properly?

It seems like every time I have to run this thing it fails with that lovely "Configuration Failed" error message...and this is of course after 15-20 min and 92.57% or whatever random percentage it pulls out of the air.

You can dig through the logs, the "Upgrade-datestamp-timestamp-randomnumber-error.log" log file often has much more informative information in it that the "PCDiagnostics_datestamp_timestamp_randomnumber.log" that the wizard recommends.

So, after that then what?

Never fear, Command Prompt is here!

Run this command from a SharePoint 2010 Management Shell prompt and 9 times out of 10 it will work...I don't know why i don't just do this to start with.

PSCONFIG.EXE -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force

there are many different switches you can add to this command all of which may or may not help but this is the one that i use the most.