I was writing here about the wonderful life with Vista Service Pack…now I have to complete that review. I cannot explain what happened in detail, and the conclusions from the previous post are still valid. This one is just an addition. The worst possible.

It all started in the weekend, when the laptop didn’t came back from that hybrid sleep Vista has (and sucks). I performed a hard reset from the button, choosed the "Start Windows normally" option and everything seemed normal. I noticed one thing, but didn’t considered it until later on: the HDD activity present at startup was almost gone, but still, I got to the desktop without errors and fast. Seeing that the HDD is "calm", I started my usual software sequence. Gaim started OK, Office also seemed fine. Firefox opened up but didn’t respond to commands. After some random clicking, it showed "not responding". Well, ok, I’ll kill the process and restart it. But no task manager at Ctrl-Alt-Del. I try rightcliking the taskbar, no response. Alt-Tab didn’t work either so all my programs appeared to be working but not accesible through the Aero GUI. I try selecting some icons from the desktop, seemed to be working. Then I double-clicked one. That was the last step, I could still move the mouse, but no input command was accepted from the periheals (except the moving cursor). Inserting removable media such as a CD or USB-stick didn’t cause any reaction.

So it began…restart after restart (forced), until the HDD was showing the normal startup activity. I learned when to restart without waiting for the complete freeze, just by looking at the HDD Led or by listening to the HDD noise. When the computer finally decided to spin the HDD as usual, everything worked fine for a while. Any operation related to shutdown, restart, hibernation etc caused the problems to appear. It was not tied to Firefox, nor to a hardware problem. It was the service pack.

I could express the situation in human term: the computer became sicker with every restart. I checked the drivers again, made some changes, checked some Vista logs, disabling Aero, disabling the security software, trying a different sequence of program startup, checked the "super-fetch" settings, rechecked for Windows Updates.

All of the above to no avail. The laptop was useless. So the next day I decided to try and uninstall the Service Pack. I started the operation very tensed, being afraid of unknown OS reactions. Waiting for the worst wasn’t justified. The uninstall was a very smooth process (it took about 20 minutes). Steps were similar to the installation, first some operations are performed from inside the operating system, then restarts come and all you see is a nice coloured screen with the progress (it goes through 3 steps, each from 0% to 100%).

Restarting the computer after the SP1 uninstall proved that my theory was right. Computer was back again to full operational state. I of course lost the boot optimization, the file copy sucks again, the HDD is in full load at computer startup and all that stuff. But after that, everything runs smoothly.

Vista Service Pack 1 - see you at the next build