Today I Defeated Vista Service Pack 1

I believe Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista came out sometime last month.  The update came up in my notification area, but every time I tried installing it, it just wouldn't install.  SP1 is a long install, it takes close to an hour, I've read an hour and a half on some message boards.  The update would to through the entire three part installation, reboot, and then decide that it didn't want to install and then revert my computer back to its previous state, which would then take another hour.  I tried the install about three times on different days like this before I finally decided that today was the day I tried to figure out what the heck is wrong with this thing.

I found a lot of my problem and none of my answer, and as usual of lot of speculations from people who actually didn't have the problem but seemed to know the answer.  I noticed that HP has a whole list of "precautions" to take while updating to SP1, it also included a note to disable virus protection. 

It would've been nice if I had this option.  Well, my actual virus protection software made it difficult to turn off, and the service pack actually reboots a few times during the process and I suspected the software was just turning itself back on during this whole install at the end.

I finally gave up and uninstalled the virus protection.  I did a few other things prior to this, according to this article, which I suspect didn't actually do anything, but you never know.  I checked for errors on the hard drive, did a system file checker, and I ran the memory diagnostic tool for Vista, as well as uninstalled the virus protection.  Mind you, this was the fourth time today that I was going to try this update, on top of the three that I had done on other days.  I had pretty much determined that if this was not going to work then I would be done with SP1 and live with the fact that my computer will probably never function properly again.

Thank goodness it worked this time, because I was almost seriously considering buying a Mac next.  You know I have to be pretty pissed off at Windows to take such drastic measures...

After the service pack installed, I reinstalled my virus protection, and everything is actually running quite nicely.  I know this SP has a few under the hood changes, I actually don't really care what changes there are, as long is it doesn't mess up my system.  I also know that not keeping Windows up to date pretty much ensures you're going to run into software issues down the road... I did this with XP and SP2, I actually resisted installing SP2 for many years because it messed up my computer when it first came out.  The thing about XP updates though is you can basically skip them if you want.  I don't quite get this option with Vista.

It pretty much ate up my entire day, but I'm just happy it's working now.  I just beg of Windows not to release another service pack for awhile...