A visual guide to installing Vista SP1 public beta
You may have heard that Vista SP1 beta is now available to the general public meaning every Vista user on the planet and you may have some questions about it. How long does it take? How hard is it? How many reboots are there? I’ll try to answer some of those questions with our guide to installing Vista SP1.
Before we begin you will want to read this post and read and understand the Microsoft download details page then come back here.
After downloading the file Microsoft has provided, be sure to follow the extraction instructions and run the file as “Administrator” by right clicking it
The first few steps require patience as Windows Update may not see the updates until after a few tries but once it begins downloading Vista SP1, it won’t take long after that before it is installed. Your mileage may vary but on my system (with an AMD Athlon 5600+ processor, 3GB of DDR2 memory, 8800GTS graphics, 250GB hard drive) the primary installation took just under 30 minutes.
Depending on your system configuration the download file size will vary between 50MB and 540MB.
After you have finished the prerequisite stages listed above, Vista SP1 will download and the installer will start
Click Next and you will have to agree to the terms
The installation is now ready to begin
After the installer finishes, it’s not really finished installing, Windows Update will ask to restart the system
When the system restarts it will continue installing SP1, the installer you did in Vista was to prepare the system for file updates. There are three stages at this point, a progress percentage will be displayed. Stages one and two will be completed without a reboot. After stage two is completed the system will reboot and just before the login page is displayed, stage three of the installation will start, conclude and take you to the account login.
Stage 1 takes the longest amount of time, Stage 2 less so and Stage 3 is by far the quickest to complete.
To install Vista SP1 itself takes just three reboots, that, of course is not counting the prerequisite updates that must be installed before you can install SP1 which require several reboots themselves.
After all is said and done, Vista will now report itself as version 6.0 build 6001 (Version 6.0.6001)
Related Posts:
