The long awaited , update to Vista was released on Tuesday. After my experienced with it, I have to say it is the most painful service pack ever from Microsoft. Remember the times when all you had to do is install the service pack, do one reboot and all is done ? well not anymore. Prepare to leave things overnight , expect it not to install, and take another hour reverting changes, and expect to have no indication of what went wrong. This was my experience while installing Vista SP1.

I downloaded the standalone install, let in install. It goes up to stage 3, and when it is 100% complete, the screen shows "Install was not successful, Reverting changes". This process goes on for about an hour and 2 reboots. The reversal is actually good, it brings back my  system to the pre- SP1 install state. After trying this since Tuesday and getting no where, I took the step of re-installing Vista.

I used the Upgrade option, as not to loose any of my settings or files. I then applied SP1 to this "fresh" installation and it worked !!.  SP1, includes all updates since the Vista release, and I think the setup process gets confused on a Vista system, that is fully patched.

Therefore, the "works-for-me-anecdotal" method to get SP1 to install, is to re-install Vista, and then apply SP1. Do not use windows update after the Vista re-install. Disable any anti-virus  and anti-spyware.

Haven't noticed any major performance improvements yet though. Though it seems a bit faster. Resume from hibernation is noticeably faster. I had issues where the system would hang when resuming. Will wait and see.

Fingers crossed....