I was really excited for Service Pack 1 to be coming out for a few reasons.  One of the reasons was to finally see if Vista was really the business capable operating system that Microsoft has been saying it is.  I know some of my customers have been waiting to see how much of an impact SP1 makes to Vista.  Will it make the operating system more stable?  Will it be more compatible with all the hardware and software that already works well with XP? 

I started installing on the morning of March 18th with Windows update.  The download and first part of the install went very smoothly.  I got to the part where it says "Microsoft needs to reboot the computer to finish installation."  So the computer started shutting down, then installing step 1 of 3 of the Service Pack.  It got to 12% and failed.  It then reversed the changes and said it would try again upon startup. 

So the computer shut down, and started up again.  Then the service pack started to install again.  And once again it failed.  Once again it reversed the changes it had made and rebooted again.  This time upon startup it didn't try to install again.  I got back into Windows and looked for the error: Windows Update 80070005.  This turns out to be a big admin issue that others have had problems with since Windows XP.  After studying dozens of solutions and trying them I finally got the service pack to install THAT NIGHT.  Yes, it took at least 7 tries to get it to install.  Looking through loads of data online about this I found that one of the most prominent fixes Microsoft recommended was to do a clean install.  What kind of fix is that.  Some users paid Microsoft the $59 support fee just to be told to format their drives and reinstall Windows.  WOW.

On the morning of the 19th I was surprised to find my machine booted up with no errors.  I was greeted by the Windows Welcome Center.  Something looked different... I have had 4GB if RAM in my computer since it was built, and we all know that 32bit operating systems cannot address the full 4GB of RAM because of other considerations it has to make with video and virtual RAM.  Therefore Vista has always shown 3GB of RAM in the Welcome Center but since Service Pack 1, it has been showing 4GB of RAM! 

I'm making the assumption that whatever Microsoft did with this Service Pack, it has made the operating system capable of more efficiently addressing what RAM the system has.  Since it's a 32bit system it's still not going to use more than 4GB of RAM, however it can at least acknowledge that it's there - and that's a good sign.

My system does seem a bit quicker moving between applications as well.  I ran 3 antivirus/antispyware scans at the same time to see how that would affect my system and the system took a bit of a performance hit but not as bad as I thought it was going to take, and it stayed stable the whole time - no crashes. 

As I worked along I started to forget how tedious the installation had been (I really didn't get into the workarounds that I tried because it was so mind numbing I couldn't bring myself to write about them - it was that bad).   Then POP - an error.  "Server execution failed" was the error and it had something to do with my network. 

I was still on the internet.  I had a valid IP address.  I was receiving emails.  I could ping other IPs in my subnet.  So what then did this mean?  I tried to bring up the Networking area and my explorer.exe crashed.  I tried again and again explorer.exe crashed (not IE, but the windows desktop environment like the start toolbar and the desktop where your icons are, for the non-techies out there). 

This can't be good....I opened my System info and saw this.

Something is really wrong.  I can't put my finger on it but what happened to the information about the computer?  On this page it doesn't see my RAM or my CPU type or my "Vista score" or anything.  It's all gone.  So much for thinking that Service Pack 1 finally installed and all was going to be great.

I must say I'm very disappointed.  I really wanted to have more people accept Vista as the next generation OS.  It definitely make it a simpler world for developers if we all jumped on the bandwagon.  There would be less compatibility problems because they could focus on making applications that really shined in the Vista OS.  Now we're left with this, well - botched Service Pack 1 fiasco.  They nearly released it a month ago and pulled it back because there were some "issues" that people were experiencing with trying to get the SP installed but it doesn't seem to have been reworked much. 

I have to say that I really wasn't expecting this from Microsoft.  I mean their past releases of Service Packs for operating systems and for Office Suites have gone rather smoothly.  All have patched up vulnerabilities and have added great features that made the Service Packs praiseworthy.  Microsoft XP Service Pack 2 for instance was probably one of the best releases Microsoft has ever made.  Surely, I thought, Microsoft would at least live up to the standard that they have in the past. 

Nope.  They really lost a great opportunity to have more people, and more importantly businesses, adopt the latest OS.  How can it be recommended now?  Businesses can't be down for a full day trying to get a Service Pack to install and then find out that it broke some functionality that they previously had.  That would then mean a clean install after all of that, just to get it to work right.  Then putting on all the data, then hoping everything will be ok and nothing was lost in the process.  That is just NOT going to happen. 

Terrible.