Upgrading Vista to SP1

Friday February 29, 2008 

Ever since Vista was released, and some hardware ceased to work with it, I’ve been waiting for SP1 of the OS, simply because it was said that it would contain more drivers, so there was a small chance that stuff that was busted might come back from the dead.  Or, there’s a possibility that it wouldn’t make a difference at all.  Only way to find out would be to install it and see.  So I got a copy from MSDN and gave it a go.  We’ll most likely be installing it on our Vista machines at work anyway, so best to get a  little experience with it.

01

It goes without saying, but here it is anyway - please back up all data on your machine that you can’t afford to lose.  There shouldn’t be any problems with running the upgrade, but wouldn’t you rather just feel safe that everything was backed up, just in case?

The whole thing really is fairly straightforward, only about 4 boxes before you just walk away from it and let it do its thing.

02

Microsoft mentions that it’ll take about an hour to run the complete upgrade, and, quite surprisingly, they weren’t far off.  The whole thing was done in about 70 minutes.  Ironic, when you consider that I’ve seen Vista estimate that it would take 18,000 *days* to finish copying or moving something on the system.  Evidently Microsoft’s time estimation algorithm has gotten a bit better ;)

03

So, after running the upgrade, what’s the final verdict?  For myself, installing the upgrade didn’t revive any of my dead hardware (scanner, printer), although I did find workarounds for both that allowed me to use both under Vista.  But that’s a couple of future posts.

If nothing else, patching your machine with SP1 when it comes out as part of Windows Update will get all currently available patches on your machine, and there’s rarely a downside to that.  A lot of people didn’t want to put SP2 on their XP machine when it came out, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone today who would tell you why.  It just makes the machine run better. 

And in the long run, SP1 will be better for your Vista box as well.

Filed Under Vista

Comments

One Response to “Upgrading Vista to SP1”

  1. Harsh on June 13th, 2008 3:01 am

    18000 days!!! WOW

    were you copying Microsoft’s database into your system???

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