Updating Windows Vista – An Adventure

I’m not sure why I found all of this amusing, but I thought I’d share anyway.

My housemate had put an ‘old’ laptop into storage, but had need of it again.  It had Vista on it – a pre Service Pack 1 Vista.  In fact I’m pretty sure it was pretty close to ‘only just released Vista’.  So, of course, I had to update it to the latest (Service Pack 2, plus a bit).

The first round saw Windows Update informing me of 69 Critical Updates.  I attempted to install them all in one go.  Update simply sat there with an empty progress bar with the words “Preparing to install”.  A few hours later I rebooted, and tried again – to get the same result.

I then began installing the updates one at a time – and this seemed to work.  I went to five at a time, then ten, then in a fit of madness I let the last 22 go through, which all worked.

Curiously I still wasn’t at Service Pack 1.  Impatient, I downloaded SP1 from Microsoft and a few hours later it was applied.  Now we had 49 critical updates to apply.  These were applied, leaving us with three critical updates.

Finally I got to one critical update, which was Service Pack 2.

Two hours later I still had an empty progress bar.  On trying to reboot the machine I discovered a “hidden” dialogue asking me whether I agreed to SP2’s Terms and Conditions.  After the reboot, I began again, found the hidden dialogue (it popped up behind the Windows Update window) and away we went.  Within an hour we now had a Windows Vista SP2.

I asked it to search for more updates, just to be sure, and it finally answered that there were four critical updates.  After the reboot we had one critical updated.  Then three and as of last night, we had one, which I applied – then went to bed.

I can’t help wondering how many more updates I’ll have to apply and why I can’t tell it just to do all of the damned things, while rebooting as necessary.

About Lisa

A Geeky Gamergrrl who obsesses about the strangest things.
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