Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 22 May 2008 09:30
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Lumbered with a laptop computer that has three of the drivers Microsoft
specially detected to prevent Vista SP1’s download, jumping aboard the
SP1 train via Windows Update was something Microsoft was specifically
preventing me from doing. But I’ve loaded it anyway. What are my
experiences so far, and how did I do it?
I’ve wanted to try out Vista SP1 now ever since it became officially available to users via Windows Update, and at the time hassled Microsoft over the initial SP1 delays and then the driver issue debacle that prevented some users, including me, from joining the SP1 party.
The Windows Update version of SP1 is less than 100MB in size, and can only be downloaded by Vista users whose computers pass an internal Microsoft test to ensure that you don’t have one of several offending drivers that could cause problems.
Sadly, my computer, a Fujitsu T4200 Tablet PC had three “problem” drivers – the sound card driver, the Authentic fingerprint reader driver and the video card driver.
Until I could get new drivers for these items, SP1 simply was not available through Windows Update, although it could be downloaded as a 400+ MB file (which included multiple languages inside) and you could try installing it at your own risk.
Looking at Fujitsu’s worldwide sites showed no movement at the station on driver updates, but now that I’ve actually gone to SP1 anyway, the updated drivers will probably quickly emerge, although as far as I am aware they are not there yet.
Microsoft had released, via Windows Update, a soundcard update which would have upgraded my sound driver to an SP1 compatible level, but not the video or fingerprint reader drivers, but sadly that driver caused problems for many people.
I was going to give that sound driver a go anyway, after waiting a few days, because I wanted to make an image based backup first. But, I went back to Windows Update, I discovered that the update had been removed completely – and no, I hadn’t somehow downloaded it first anyway without realising, and I did check my update history to make sure.
I was also having two other problems with my pre-SP1 installation of Vista, which had otherwise been working fine.
The first was that I couldn’t get my Windows Mobile Device Centre WMDC to work with an Ultimate 9502 Windows Mobile 6 Professional smartphone, nor could I install Norton 360 Version 2.0, which I had receive from Symantec to test as a review copy.
The WMDC just wouldn’t open, and if I tried installing the update from the web, it would get to half-a-millimetre away from the green bar completing the installation before deciding to give up and just reverse the installation process.
Norton 360 V2.0 had an issue during installation and wouldn’t proceed, despite sending information to Symantec and giving me a Norton cleaning tool to install and use which didn’t help.
So, after making a backup of all my data in non-imaged format to a spare large hard drive, I proceeded to re-install an image I’d taken late last year of my system, during the last Vista re-installation, which included all the updates to that time, Office 2007 and all the Vista compatible drivers the Fujitsu T4200 needed to run Vista properly – which was taken precisely so I could avoid having to load Vista from scratch while still having a brand new, clean Vista RTM (pre-SP1) system with only updates and Office installed.
So, how did I get SP1 on the system? Please read onto page 2.
