Vista Service Pack 1 – an April joke from Microsoft

Okay, it’s not a real joke but I feel like one got played on me today. I noticed the update available in my Microsoft updates. I’ve been using Vista on my desktop computer for the last six months. I’ve not been really happy with it, it’s a resource intensive hog and crashes too often. The one good thing I liked about it was the backup system you can schedule each week. Of course this week on Wed, even that had a problem and I had to fix errors on the hard drive in order to back up.

Anyway, I tell the computer to down load the update thinking this might solve all my problems and maybe the thing will finally work right. The computer told me it might take several restarts and an hour to update everything. Okay, I can do that. So I download it and begin the install. It seems be going fine, the computer restarts and the updates begin applying to the computer. Then the screen goes back and there is an error in the third step. !! 0xc0190036 !! 4610/68459 (objsel.dll.mui)

Not sure what to do now, I search in google for the error and what other people did. Not too many choices or answers but I did find out that Microsoft offered free help until March 18th, not much help to me now. So I sit here watching the same error flashing over and over. Not knowing what else to do I turned the machine off. When it restarted I got the choice to launch start up repair, so I did. After what seemed like a long wait the start up repair began in safe mode checking for errors. When it was done another restart brought my system back looking the same as it did when I started. I checked the log and of course the installation of the update failed.

Why does using Vista have to be so difficult? What do people do who can’t do more than turn on a computer? I’m not an expert but I know enough to get around one pretty well. I’ve decided to wait to install the service pack for a few more weeks. If anyone is going to do it I would recommend you make a restore point, a back up and have your Vista disk handy in case of errors. I did read that there was a lot of people having problems. My next attempt will first be turning off all virus programs and spyware programs. Maybe that was the cause of the hang up, I don’t know. If anyone has an answer, I’d love to hear it. I’ll post my results when I attempt this again.