My Experience Upgrading Windows Vista to Service Pack 1
If you are not already aware the long over due awaited Windows Vista SP1 is available for download at: Download Windows Vista SP1. As a long time Windows user I vowed not to upgrade my home desktop computer to Vista before Service Pack 1 became available (From what I have heard the upgrade to Leopard is no picnic either). However, upon employment with Opensource Connections I jumped at the chance to try out Vista with the purchase of my new work laptop. Thus far I have been pleased with Windows Vista and have only experienced a few minor software crashes. I have to mention that my favorite new feature is the “Instant Search” functionality. This feature allows you to press the Start key on your keyboard and begin typing the name of the program or file you wish to open and it magically appears. I never realized how inefficient the start menu was until I started using this feature.
As every geek should be, I was nervous about upgrading my laptop to SP 1. Microsoft promises upgrading to SP1 will improve the reliability, performance, and security of Windows Vista, however, I was skeptical. If you are interested in all the gory details about the Service Pack browse to Gory Details. After downloading SP1 I hesitated to double click on the installation file in anticipation that if I do the computer will instantly display the “Blue Screen of Death“. Finally I muster up the confidence to start the installation and receive a message stating the computer will require several reboots and about an hour to complete. Naively thinking my computer is fast, this should not take an hour, I continue with the installation. After several reboots, taking the dog for a walk, doing the dishes and watching the extended versions of all three Lord of the Rings movies the installation finally finished its last reboot.
With the installation complete I am excited to see what new features are available only to be disappointed at the fact that everything looks exactly the same. It seems as though my computer is running smoother and faster, but I attribute it to the placebo effect. I guess I should just be content with the fact that the installation completed without incident, however, I make no guarantees that you will have the same experience.
Every Windows Vista user that has upgraded to SP1 must do their civic duty and comment with their upgrade experience. The good, the bad and the ugly.
March 20th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
My experience was a bit different. I jumped in with Vista after I received my free Dell provided upgrade. Upon installation, I received the BSOD. However, it seemed to recover itself and loaded up ok. My relatively new PC (XPS710) had quad-sli. nVidia had various flavors of beta drivers, but they would BSOD my computer every time I tried to install them. Since it was a gaming machine, I opted to install XP in a second partition to take advantage of the graphics which worked great in XP. I used XP until nVidia released the proper drivers last December. They installed perfectly, all was good. I rarely needed to go into XP.
Last week the nightmare started. I let Vista install a patch. Upon rebooting, it kept rebooting. Safe mode didn’t work, no modes worked. I attempted a repair with my Vista disk. Sorry, cannot repair (it said I had a bad patch). I attempted to do a system restore from a restore point. Sorry, no system restore points found. I attempted a restore from a backup. Sorry, cannot locate any restore volumes. After booting into XP to Google what was going on, it appears that if you have a dual boot system, and boot into XP, XP will erase all of your system restore points. Nice, no recovery.
So, not paying attention to when Vista SP1 was due, I spent this last week reinstalling Vista, programs, copying back files, applying the registry tweak to make XP forget about Vista, blah, blah blah. Then SP1 comes out. Hmmm, to do it or not? After verifying I had a good system restore point, I went for it. Everything went great until the very end. BSOD. However, it rebooted, recovered and seems to be working fine. We’ll see.
When not fighting this nonsense, I love it.
March 20th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Nice points about the sp install experience - maybe you can mention what the install is ’supposed’ to correct?
March 21st, 2008 at 9:29 am
I haven’t upgraded yet, though I was thinking about it. I figured I’d wait a little bit to hear what sort of pain others experienced first. My biggest complaint with Vista has been a problem where explorer crashes every couple of days, and then I lose my start bar and all explorer windows for a minute and then it comes back. After getting a recent update to Skype (which had a known issue with their IE plugin in Vista apparently), things seem to crash less, but that may be a placebo effect too. In any case, I’m hopeful that SP1 will take care of these issues, but I’m gonna wait a little longer before I try it out. Call me cautious.