Windows Vista SP1 Survival GuideWindows Vista SP1 Survival Guide

This story originally appeared March 4, 2008.

After a little more than a year in the wild, it's high time for Windows Vista to receive the service pack it deserves. While Service Pack 1 won't change the way Windows Vista looks or feels, for the most part, it will improve many things about the way it runs, based on both Microsoft's internal testing and the feedback of tens of thousands of users.

SP1 has been both heavily anticipated and badly needed. While the gold release of Vista was for the most part solid enough to use as a production system, there were still many frustrating rough edges.

In the light of these problems, one of the most commonly repeated canards about using Vista was, "I'll just wait until SP1 comes out." Well, SP1 is now almost out. A release candidate, which is the version we tested, was made available towards the end of last year. More recently, Microsoft officially released SP1 to manufacturing in February to TechNet and MSDN customers. The actual, wide public release to users at large is expected sometime in March.

What's In The Box?
Vista Service Pack 1 is a cumulative collection of all the fixes -- performance enhancements, security updates, and compatibility revisions -- published or created for Vista since its release. As with an artist's greatest-hits collection, some of it is "previously released material" -- but that absolutely doesn't mean you shouldn't apply SP1. Otherwise you won't get the full benefit of all the changes made.

Keep in mind that SP1 will be large -- quite necessarily so. The standalone installer for SP1 will weigh in at anywhere from 450 Mbytes (for the five-language edition) to 550 Mbytes (the all-language edition), and you'll need at least 5 Gbytes of temporary space on your system to perform the install. Most PCs capable of running Vista right now should not have a problem sparing that much room, but if you do, then a cleanup -- or maybe even a new hard drive, if it's already time for one -- is in order. (Note that there are ways to ameliorate both the storage and download requirements; see "Express" on page 3 for details.)

Here's a quick rundown of the types of fixes and changes that SP1 contains:

If you want to see the full manifest of changes, Microsoft has them all in a collection of Word documents. The documents named "Notable Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate" (the name may change when SP1 is officially "baked") and "Overview of Windows Vista Service Pack 1" are the ones you want to look at. (There is another overview in the Windows Vista Technical Library on TechNet .)

So what's not in SP1? For one, Microsoft has stated there will not be any major changes to the user experience. What you saw in Vista gold will be almost exactly the same as what you see in SP1, as far as the UI goes. Another thing that Microsoft has tried to keep to a minimum is the amount of things that would change application compatibility: if it ran in Vista gold, it ought to run in Vista SP1 as well.

In these next few sections I'm going to talk about how to obtain and apply Vista SP1 in a way that best complements your organization or your work habits. There's more than one way to do it, and a certain degree of planning ahead is required to make sure things go off smoothly. Step 1: Strategize

There are roughly seven basic ways Service Pack 1 can be installed, with some slight overlap between some of the methods.

These next four methods are meant mainly for environments where you're managing a great many desktops at once:

With any kind of group deployment it's always best to take the time to test SP1 on a guinea-pig machine, whenever possible, to see if SP1 causes any changes in behavior for a typical system's application set or hardware. Also see if there's a difference in behavior between patching an existing system (i.e., #1, #2, #4, and #7 above) vs. recreating the system from the ground up (#3, #5, or #6), depending on what'll be most efficient for your organization. For instance, if you're planning on updating a great many applications along with the system itself, a full system re-image might be the best choice, depending on how much is being installed and in what form.

Individual users may want to take advantage of SP1 as an opportunity to install Windows entirely from the ground up -- a way to do a clean sweep of the accumulation of a year or more's worth of clutter. This isn't a bad idea -- in fact, it's something I've done myself with XP SP1 and SP2 -- but it has to be approached correctly, and it does take a fair amount of work.

For one, you'll need to make a quick inventory of all the third-party applications and crucial system drivers that you need to reinstall after swabbing the deck. If you have system drivers that were not installed by Vista proper -- mass-storage drivers, for instance -- make sure you have those in hand before you start setting things up.

(Tip: Place any drivers needed for setup, such as mass storage controller drivers, on a removable USB drive if you have one. Vista can read from such devices to obtain drivers during the setup process, and you can cram a lot more onto one such drive than you can into any number of floppies or even a CD.)

Note that unlike other Windows service packs, it's not possible to apply Vista SP1 to an offline Windows Vista image, due to changes in the way the service pack is packaged. The Winbeta.org site has outlined an undocumented method to do this (not attempted by me), but it's rather complicated and requires a fair amount of legwork, and of course there's no guarantee it'll succeed.

Finally, Microsoft's Deployment Guide for Vista SP1 (currently updated for the release candidate of SP1) goes into detail about all the above methods, and provides links to additional tools and guides that ought to come in handy during a rollout. Step 2: Back Up and Clean Up

You're probably as sick of hearing this mantra as everyone else is, but here it is one more time: Back up anything of consequence before you install SP1. "Anything of consequence" means, mainly, user data -- anything you created yourself, or anything you downloaded from someplace that may be difficult to reacquire.

Another possible way to phrase this mantra: Back up anything of consequence that's on your system drive before you install SP1. I make this distinction because anything not on the system drive is that much less likely to be affected if SP1 doesn't install correctly.

What's the best way to do this? Aside from Vista's native backup tools, there's the Windows Easy Transfer application, which can serve as a sort of backup tool for your personal data. Run it and you can save not only your documents but also application settings to a repository somewhere -- typically a non-system hard drive. Once Vista's been reinstalled and patched with SP1, you can reinstall any missing apps and run Easy Transfer again to restore everything. I've used this technique a few times myself, although you do need to be judicious about what you choose to back up and restore with it: I have all my music on a separate physical drive, for instance, so there was no need to back that up and waste 100 Gbytes of space.

If the disk you're backing up to is big enough, you can make a full disk image -- again, either with Vista itself (only if you're running Ultimate, though) or with a third-party tool. My app of choice in this regard for a while has been Image for DOS. Don't let the name fool you: it backs up and restores partitions for any operating system, and even comes in a Windows-native version that can also back up open files. The most recent version of Image for DOS/Windows can also perform differential whole-disk backups.

Other people swear by the Acronis True Image suite of utilities (also available in a 30-day trial version). I should also mention another favorite of mine, albeit in a slightly different vein: Mozy, an online backup service that offers 2 Gbytes for free and unlimited storage for $4.95 a month.

If you're already in the habit of making backups, take the extra step to make sure the most recent backups you've created can be properly restored, too.

This would also be a good time to remove everything that does not absolutely have to be there. Do a quick audit of your installed applications and see if there's anything that can afford to be removed. The less you have cluttering any given system, the better; this includes things like performing temporary directory cleanups.

One final point to consider is how to deal with hardware drivers -- whether or not to update them to their most recent iterations before applying SP1. Some people think it's best to patch with SP1 first, and then update any device drivers; that way, if they update a given device driver and that creates a problem, the source of the problem (the driver vs. the service pack itself) will be more immediately evident, and they can roll back to the earlier iteration of the device driver as an interim measure. I prefer to update drivers ahead of time if needed, shake down a bit, and then patch, but only because I've had a degree of experience with how these things behave and am not as easily thrown by something acting weird.

For corporate installations where there may be user data that needs to be preserved, there are a couple of approaches if you're not already performing such backups. One native solution is to run a scripted backup job before the patch process, using the command-line WBADMIN tool (available only in the Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate SKUs). This can be used to back up user data to a separate hard drive or a network share; said data can then be restored after the update if needed.

Step 3: Patch

This is the slow and boring part, and depending on how you do it, it'll typically mean that your system will be offline for an hour or more. (Get caught up on all those books you keep meaning to read!)

If you're patching a notebook, plug it into a wall outlet and make sure it has uninterrupted power. Desktop machines should ideally get the same treatment -- i.e., an uninterruptible power supply -- if you can afford it, even outside of this scenario. I live in an area with extremely unpredictable and dirty power, and I don't have anything computer-related that isn't plugged into a UPS.

Once you launch the SP1 installer, the whole process is essentially automatic. You'll confirm a couple of dialog boxes, and then the system will unpack everything, apply the changes, and then reboot several times. During these reboots you'll see a splash screen that says "Applying update X of Y", along with the spinning-circle cursor that indicates something's happening. As long as the drive activity light is on and the cursor is still active, it's still working, so don't touch anything.

The only time you should think about pulling the plug is if the system hangs entirely or crashes. If it does, restart the system and see if it's able to pick up where it left off. A hard hang may be a symptom of an underlying problem that ought to be addressed before you attempt to apply the service pack. Were I in the driver's seat, I'd attempt to complete the patch process, but I'd be wary after that point and would keep my backups close at hand just in case.

Step 4: Verify

After the reboot cycle finishes and you're allowed to log back on conventionally, take the time to make sure that your applications and the system as a whole behave normally.

I usually give a patched system about a week of regular use to shake down any possible problems or changes in behavior. An individual application might suddenly cease to respond or start behaving erratically, although in my own testing (limited to three systems), common programs like Office, Firefox, and so forth all behaved exactly as before. If things run, but not well, take a gander at my article on boosting Vista performance to see if you've overlooked something that might be sapping your system, SP1 aside.

A hard crash of any kind -- a BSOD -- should be taken very seriously. BSODs in Vista are almost always due to a problematic kernel-level driver -- most commonly, a video driver. They have become mercifully quite rare: in my entire time using Vista (a year and change at this point), I've tallied maybe two such crashes, both due to video drivers that needed updating.

If things are consistently unstable, you can uninstall SP1 and see if that changes anything; there may be something that simply isn't playing nice with SP1 yet (or vice versa).

One of the reasons I recommended imaging the whole system (if possible) as a backup solution is because restoring a whole system image is often a lot less complicated and potentially thorny, if slower, than removing SP1 manually. If you want to remove SP1, look for the uninstall option in Control Panel -- Programs and Features -- View Installed Updates.

Note that if you plan to install the production release of SP1 on a system that had a beta or release candidate of SP1 installed, you must remove the old version of SP1 first.