Microsoft released the first Service Pack (SP1) for the Vista family of operating systems a couple of days back. There are two machines running Vista in our house; one reported that SP1 was available to install, the other did not. It turns out that the machine that did not react is behaving perfectly correctly. I have a Logitech webcam installed on that machine, and there is a known conflict between a Logitech driver file and one of the files in SP1. The update process checks for the presence of files that can cause problems on target machines, and does not proceed if it finds a potential problem. I’ll just have to wait until Microsoft resolves this issue.
That’s fine, but what I found disconcerting was the experience I had with the other machine, the one that flagged that it was OK to install SP1.
I gave the OK to install SP1, and the process began. While it lasted a while (about 45 minutes, I think) and included a reboot, that was acceptable. What I don’t think is acceptable is that when the machine was finally up and running, it was clear that, even though a successful upgrade had been reported, something was not right. It turned out that:
- the screen resolution was set to 800 x 600, and could not be set to the proper resolution of 1280 x 800
- there was no sound
Both of these were caused because the upgrade process did not use the required specific hardware drivers, but used default drivers from Microsoft. Now, because I’m a geek, I was able to use Vista’s device manager to diagnose and correct the problems by reinstalling the NVIDIA and RealTek drivers for the display and sound hardware respectively. But for the non-geeks amongst us, this would simply be a disaster.
Even more alarming, Windows Update started reporting that it had one more important update to install, but every time it attempted to install it, the process failed with an error code 80070103. Vista’s Help and Support system suggested reinstalling the update (it was an new software driver for the touchpad), but this didn’t help – the process simply reported that the latest software driver was already installed, and meanwhile Windows Update kept on insisting that there was an important update to install. In the end, I had to completely uninstall the touchpad driver manually, and then let Windows Update take over to install the new driver. Once again, I can’t see that non-computer folks would be comfortable about doing this.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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