Still Standing

Posted by Christopher Smith Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:09:00 GMT

For those of you who still care about Vista, I “upgraded” to SP1 and didn’t encounter any of the problems that a lot of others have had.

The 127 MB download took forever (like 45 minutes despite our pricey DSL connection), and then the installer popped up a dialogue saying that it needed at least 3GB of disk space on the main Windows partition and wouldn’t install until I made room. I’m trying to figure out how a rational person could think that a 127MB download might need 3GB of disk space to complete (yeah, I can see contrived situations where it’d be possible, but come on!). I dutifully cleared away like 15GB of downloads that were just sitting around on my drive, ran the install, dutifully rebooted the system as one would expect from Windows, and then confirmed that the entire install had consumed ~800MB of disk space (I’m guessing a 2:1 compression ratio, binary diffs, plus backing up the old files for rollback pretty much explains all of that).

You know, it is sad enough watching those progress bars behave like meandering drunks stumbling to the next bar during the later hours of a pub crawl, but really, is it so hard to have a reasonably accurate estimate of how much disk space is needed for an install?

OOopps!

Posted by Christopher Smith Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:21:00 GMT

I was just to curious about what could be causing problems with Vista when I swapped out my motherboard, so I had to explore further. I had forgotten that my old motherboard had died in the middle of a Vista update, so the OS was understandibly in a bit of an ugly state. Booting up the OS install DVD repaired the problem and I was off to the races….. then I installed the updates.

It turns out I’m effected by a bug in one of the updates that appears to be effecting a lot of people. I’m not surprised. If my BSOD is to be believed, my AHCI driver is busted. I can’t imagine what it is like for people who have their system set to automatically install updates, but at least I was able to recover quickly by reverting to a previous configuration.

I’d love to hear the inside scoop on what was going on there.