A friends Vista laptop which I was fixing (a Vista mare to do with a 'non-vista-compliant broadband router), auto-updated SP1 last week. The first I knew was a stonking great windows update which turned out to be SP1.

It (thankfully) installed without incident - about the first thing which has gone right with this pain in the arse of a machine.

Loads of folks are having trouble with MS Update on Vista either being supposedly corrupted or SP1 just fails to install. Either it fails at 12% (for some 13%) when doing the update route or it fails about 5 mins into a manual install with the fabled 80073712 error.

No one has found a solution and all the attempts by MS Tech support have failed. The one solution that appears to work is a full reinstall but I havent got the time to re-tweak Vista and let it settle down.

MS is being very quiet on this.

As mysterious and baffling as they seem, they're not really thinking. Yes we are. Hey, who typed that?

SP1 Beta stuffed my home PC when I tried to uninstall it to make way for the official SP1 last week. After I uninstalled the beta, my PC wouldn't reboot, complaining various system files where missing. After piddling on with it for an entire evening trying to get it to boot, I decided to re-install and thankfully all my docs where on the second drive.

The proper SP1 went on with no hiccups, so far!

I downloaded the Vista SP1 update (KB936330, including all languages - about 440MB) and it installed perfectly on my Vaio laptop.

No issues, no problems - just took a while to "run"...but everything rosy over here.

Maybe I was just "lucky" ??

how much of vista is covered in sticking plaster?

WOOAAAWWW, after the thread & database deadlock ... M$ will fill in for a patented sys-update rebooty deadlock. A first in its class !!!!!

"Few & rare events" ... do they yahoo! or google at M$? Or do they just want to buy Yahoo! to remove all the entries "M$ VI$TA $P1 $uck$"? G 678,000 & Y! 494,000 hits btw.

/ mine's the one with knotted sleeves.

Since I installed Vista at home I have had no trouble at all, less than I had with XP (admittedly I used that for a longer period of time) so overall I'm happy with Vista. I have Ubuntu on my Laptop and I had a few issues with the install but overall I have two OS's which both seem to work well and do what I want them to do :-)

</smug>

"Thankfully all my docs where on the second drive"

You'd have to be some kind of retard to install a beta service pack on a machine with critical documents (and the implied lack of back up).

i have had no problem with the Vista service pack, maybe i am lucky also as everyone i know did! most strange that one.

Unfortunately when I installed SP1 my RAID array collapsed.

Some careful diagnostics later it emerged that one of the drives was knackered. And before anyone comments, it was a 2 month old Seagate 7200.10 SATA2, operating fine until I SP1'd it!

I hadn't heard of this issue before now, but I installed SP1 last night and it sat at 13% for bloody ages (10-20 minutes with no apparent progress). I was starting to worry it must have stalled but eventually it carried on and completed successfully. I wonder if other 13%ers just got sick of waiting so long and aborted the install?

...SP1 had solved the issue it was meant to - where USB HIDs don't reappear on waking from sleep. Happens a lot less since SP1, but *still happens*. You wake it up, it makes the "USB device disconnected" tha-dunk noise, and your USB mouse or MC remote control doesn't work. And that particular USB port won't work with any HID device until the next sleep/wake. OK, you can work around it with a USB/PS2 converter for the mouse or just moving the device to another port, but it's a PITA.

Other than that, Vista's working fine for me, as is Ubuntu on my laptop, although the latter's a bit slow. Doesn't like the on-board Wireless adaptor though; only works under NDISWrapper and I can't for the life of me get it to autoconnect on boot (even with WICD) although the USB dongle will.

You installed SP1 beta onto your home machine and then describe them as "woes" when it doesn't uninstall??

Do you know what a beta is?

I doubt it's that you are all "lucky" SP1 went off without a hitch, more so that people with issues will be more inclined to post their woes on the interwebs as fuel for the FUD.

/ Mines the one with the M$ logo on the back and the fat stacks of cash hanging out of the pockets...

The SP1 starts to download and hits 5%,10% then 12% and then a second or two later it crashes out with the error code.

There is no long pause at 12%.

...should write a song about this - Vista loopy nuts are we..

Use to have Vista came preinstalled prior to SP1 and found it was painful to use.

Went to XP64bit and it works fine, have not had any issues, only the occasional reboot after a Windows update.

Microsoft has bitten off more than it can chew with Vista. Or, to put it more charmingly, has tried to eat something bigger than its head.

I really have to wonder if all the people who understood how an OS operates at the deepest level have left Redmond. Or to put it less charmingly, I wonder if it's simply that Microsoft doesn't know what it's doing.

Paris because ... well, just because.

@jason - There's an update out that claims to fix the fabled 80073712 error -- http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947821/en-us has the details.

Good luck!

Thanks Earle but we've tried that already twice. Mr Chen the MS Support guy always gets folks to do that but it doesnt work.

I've installed SP1 over my Ultimate x64 installation with no problems at all.

Oddly enough, I've got a Seagate 7200.10 which survived intact. I guess mine might have been the freak occurrence, but maybe there's an outside chance that Stone Fox's misfortune was due to a hardware failure and not Microsoft's fault at all?

Yes they do: Computer says NO.

To vista, to the SP1, the hotfixes and whatever. I'm happy to see that my computers have started thinking ever since vista existed and insist on having anything else.

Paris icon? Because she thinks like computers......

Interesting you say a 2 month old seagate sata got hosed, a friend had one fail (near new machine) after installing Vista, and its replacement also died after the vista install.

When he took them back to the shop, they confirmed that the drives were totally firetrucked (starts with f ends in ...) when they ran the diagnoistics (they were trying to avoid giving a 3rd drive under warranty) and as he was waiting for them to run the test someione else come in with a vista hosed sata seagate drive curiouser and curioser

only problem I had with SP1 was all my shared drives wouldn't share - all the permissions etc showed OK but no go.

just had to remove the sharing, then share them again and all was sweet.

(icon because i still hate him...)

Bake it, mash it put it in a pie!

Yep, SP 1 worked fine for me. My machine seems to be much more stable during gaming and also seems to be running a shade faster.

Where is Webster Phreaky when you need him?

>Use to have Vista came preinstalled prior to SP1 and found it was painful to use.

Went to XP64bit and it works fine, have not had any issues, only the occasional reboot after a Windows update.<

Same here, but found I missed the UI so went back to Vista, at least on my work laptop. Even used to Office 2007 now, but agree the interface isn't as good (or easy to use) as Office 2003. My gaming desktop has gone back to XP, just for the speed. DX10 won't be important for at least another few graphic card generations, ie DX 10.5 or something.

No problems with SP1 update, not many noticeable improvements either, mainly file copying.

It's already out, showed up on my windows update notifier about two weeks ago. So why to they keep saying mid-April?

Vista SP1 installed and works fine, but then again, so did RTM.

Maybe all the Vista flame posts were actually faked by Mac users who were jealous of Flip3D? ;-)

OS numbers change, but the basic, hard-coded, fact-of-life reboot requirement has been there since Win95 and seems there to stay - even in 64-bit versions.

Methinks that, 200 years from now, Windows Eon 4 will be 4096-bit capable, manage 256 discreet processing units and 4 petabytes of RAM (forget disk space - everything will be RAM by that time), and still, every now and then, a popup will center on the screen, asking "Windows needs to reboot now. Please confirm." with a lonely OK button underneath.

And if you don't confirm in 25 seconds, it will anyway.

It's only been 2 days since I last fixed my dads new laptop after updates corrupted files and made it think that it wasn't a genuine copy.

my time wasted because of a silly bit of crappy coding...

I'm just glad that I've not got vista as I can't be bothered to waste the time, money or efort on it.

I've updated my desktop using manual update & downloaded the full package to do my laptop as the SP didn't appear on the update site. I suspect OEM machines (like my Compaq laptop) are ones that are not getting the automatic updates yet - just in case. My desktop's a homebuilt one so I guess that's why the update was available.

Anyway, both went smoothly - laptop took over an hour to do - and now I've got a few noticeable improvements - specifically boot-time on the laptop has been drastically reduced. I'm a bit disappointed that I'm still having issues with network drives taking ages to be updated, even with indexing turned off, but I'm otherwise more than happy with the way Vista is running on both machines.

Nope. Mine's an OEM Packard Bell and it picked it up on automatic updates.

..I believe that whether you get offered SP1 or not depends on whether MS thinks your drivers are all fully compatible or not. There is a list of questionable drivers and machines with them are not offered SP1. Apparently.

Since it seems MS is pre pre pre patching prexisting flaws moreso with every passing day, is now a good time for me to try Vista again or should I just stab myself in the eye instead?