Because of my job, I occasionally get to do some interesting things. Things I wouldn’t normally do. Like test Safe Eyes on Vista from time to time. Now, thanks to the wonder of virtualization and especially Parallels Desktop for Mac, I don’t actually have to have a computer with Vista installed. I have a VM set up and ready to go if the need arises.
The other day, the need arose. The bat-signal was lit up because someone had some problems getting Safe Eyes to run after installing Vista’s newly released Service Pack 1 (SP1 for all you OS gurus out there). So, I got out my trusty Vista VM and said, “no problem, I’ll just install SP1 myself to make sure we don’t have a major incompatibility on our hands.”
My first clue this wasn’t going to be an enjoyable experience was when I tried to download it. I went to IE7 (because what better product is there to download a Microsoft product than IE) and went searching. Of course, it wasn’t right there, but with a little help from Google, I found the download page. That’s when I saw it was 434MB. No problem–we’ve got a pretty fast connection at the office. I started it up, it got to around 100MB and just hung there. No progress, no nothin’. Finally, after about 10 minutes, I canceled the download and re-started it. This time, it got further, but after about 15 minutes, I got a “The connection was interrupted” box and my download had died again. IE can’t pick up where it left off, so I said, “forget this,” and proceeded to download it in Safari 3.1 on the Mac side. It downloaded perfectly and I copied it right into my Vista “hard drive.”
Now, to get the install started:
What?! Over an hour? For a service pack? Seriously? I’m not even sure it took an hour to install Vista in the first place (this is a mid-2007, 20″ aluminum iMac that runs a 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor). To top it off, it would restart my “computer” several times. Well, nothing for it, but to do it.
Sure enough, the install took well over an hour (more like an hour and 15 minutes), restarted my computer three times (three?!), and several times just hung there at “Step 1 of 3, 0%” for a while. Why bother putting in a percent if it’s not going to, you know, calculate?
Fun stuff. The long and short of it is, I had no problems once it was installed. Vista even seems a bit snappier and more responsive than it was (which others are reporting too). Safe Eyes functioned normally under Vista SP1 and other than a half of my day gone, it turned out pretty well. Don’t worry, Microsoft is not going to “push” this via the Windows Automatic Updates until mid-April sometime, so you have a little time to prepare, set aside a half day, and pray all your drivers (apparently, some subset of the Intel GMA950 video drivers can really hose you up) and peripherals work when you’re done!
Oh, and I apologize for the LOLcat-speak in the subject line. I was in sort of a LOLcat mood.
Yeah, I love MS’s progress percent/time meter… That thing has never been accurate for any program since Win98. Except for maybe the FFXI install on the 360… geesh!
I fear the day that I put SP1 on my laptop at home. You can be darn sure that I will have everything backed up first.