Comments on: Vista SP1: Small things come in big packages

As for why the service pack is so huge in the first place, Microsoft says several technical decisions come into play.

[Kings X Rocks!]

My Gawd!

No anit-MS comments yet? I'm disappointed.

[SeizeCTRL]

Only a matter of time

I'm sure they will pop up in the next hour or so.

[georgiarat]

No Comments Necessary

The article says volumes.....

[Gunady]

Don't repeat Visual Studio 2005 SP1 mess..

I have a nightmare installing VS2005 SP1 in my machine, that has about 2-3GB left, and it turns out that VS2005 SP1 requires 6-7GB. And sadly, it runs without validating the required free space, and in the middle, the installation simply stop with some error messages. And that's it, my VS2005 stop working, .NET Framework 2.0 was corrupted. Repair, Uninstall, Reinstall without success.. The last option: reinstall OS, bad bad bad :(.

Hope Vista doesn't have same problem, although I highly expect SP1 of Vista to come out as soon as possible.

[supercoolpcguy]

We'll see

A 1GB update that takes (even temporarily) 7GB while installing? Compressed into 50MB over Windows Auto Updates? Don't hold your breath.

[MaLvaDo39]

Stockholm Syndrome

Microsoft has you captive and you sympathize with them...

You remain in the dark age of computing as long as Windows is
your OS...

[ncalishome]

LOL rediculous

First, how is anyone captive? I transition from working in Vista on my workstations to OSX on my laptop without missing a beat. Actually I feel slightly captive on my Mac laptop with all its proprietary goodness. With a lot of marketshare moving to Apple, lots of people are proving your remark to be totally wrong.

And dark age of computing? Lol, seriously?! Macs and OSX sure are shiny but even the Mac nutjobs in my office here can't show me how their Mac makes them any more productive or creative. It's just preference, get over it. If you're a productive person I find you'll be productive with whatever you use.

[paulreid99]

If you don't have the space...

You may be able to mount an additional drive as a folder in Drive Manager (wherever that is now) and "fool" the OS into thinking there is space on the OS drive.

You would probably have to figure out where Microsoft wants to put its temp files and mount it as that folder name.

May work. Don't know. The risk is yours. But if you are looking at reinstalling anyway.

[rcrusoe]

Most businesses can't afford to reinstall the OS

but then again, most businesses are waiting for SP1 before evaluating Vista.

It was a simple choice for us. Vista wouldn't run our primary app, so we moved to a browser based app. And that change allows us to run more Macs and Linux machines.

Guess Vista does save you money. :)

[Gringras]

And this is a good thing?

I'm no genius but, doesn't this seem odd to anyone else?

[loydd]

the partition

that is the most annoying thing that they put onto it

[robert1275]

Poor marketing and distribution

Once again Microsoft does a poor job of marketing. The key to get consumers to buy this type of thing is to have it ready by Christmas...at least for the OEMs. This is a great incentive to buy for Christmas. Terrible sales, marketing, and development

[maeckg]

Please no rush job / install partition default

Security updates need to be quickly available, but a service pack has to work right from the install. MS should take the time to optimize the SP for a change since Vista is very bloated anyway. An installer that is more flexible than using 7 gig on the system partition would be easily achievable for a company as large as MS.
Speaking of which: Windows installer should automatically default to creating a system partition separate from the user profiles, programs and data. The harddrives are usually large enough. I always do this so I can easily reinstall the OS, but preinstalled Windows machines and most users do not. It would make maintenance, security and updates easier and more reliable and does not cost anything.
My issue with the size of the SP1 install is that I have three operating systems installed on different partitions already on my Vista machine as well as a Virtual PC guest OS. I went by the Vista guides for the recommended size of the system partition plus generous wiggle room, but SP2 might be a tight fit.

[Stating]

Guess I'll Be Repartitioning

One would hope that the 7 gig free space requirement can be satisfied by having the space on any available partition not just C:, but I'm not counting on it.

Also, it seems kind of nutty that there still isn't a mechanism to archive off to DVD or other media all those KB patch, rollback, and uninstall files. After a year or so of operation the drive gets filled up with gigabytes of useless crud.

[tromba59]

Critical Mass

At what point does this thing just implode? Windows, as well as most software, has become a big, fat, ugly solution looking desperately for a problem. Occam's Razor, boys & girls.

[ronwolfe]

1 gig XP??? Try Win3.11

I still do installs of Windows 3.11, with 10 megs as the install package (6 floppies)!! And with Office 4.3, it does what most of my clients want.
But partitioning a 40gig drive into 20 partitions is a pain! (the old 2gig limit)