Installing Vista SP1 Follow Up
posted in Technology, Vista, Microsoft |Yesterday I wrote about problems installing Vista SP1 on this machine. Running the “download and run it yourself” installer worked fine with one little glitch. The issue was that I first downloaded the SP1 setup that only contained 5 languages, thinking “hey, I only really actually care about English”. The catch is that it won’t run if you have any languages other than those 5 installed. I had previously installed a ton of languages since they were just check boxes in Windows Update.
Uninstalling languages turned out to be a nightmare. First of all, you can’t uninstall from “Programs and Features”, you have to go into “Regional and Language Options”, go into the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, click a button, click another button. Then most of my attempts to remove languages would fail (after sitting doing something to my computer for what seemed like 30 minutes), PLUS it requires a reboot after each one (even though I’m uninstalling languages I’ve never ever used).
So the solution ended up being downloading the “all languages” version of the Vista SP1 package. The 20 minutes the download took was way faster than uninstalling the languages. Upgrade felt like it took a long time- I could be wrong but it feels slower than initial setup (which does make some sense since initial setup can just write an image down on your disk while upgrade is presumably doing more real work).
All is well now and so far the machine is running smoothly.