Vista SP1. Gain a patch, lose everything else.

If you haven’t been following the fall out from the release of Vista SP1 you might want to catch up before Windows automatic update forces it on you in April. It seems that some users have reported problems on the Vista team blog.

SP1 was released as a manual download on the Windows Update site early last week. Right now the update is only available for users with the English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese language packs. Although its funny that one Australian users reports that he can’t install it. I guess they don’t speak English.

The biggest problems seem to be driver related. One poster reported after installing SP1. “In retrospect, not my finest decision,” said SeppDietrich. “What a disaster! It exiled all of my Nvidia drivers to the Bermuda Triangle… they’re simply all GONE.” Microsoft has said that the service pack will not install on computers that use “incompatible” device drivers from companies like Realtek and Intel but, I couldn’t find anything related to Nvidia.

Is it just me or did Microsoft just pull support for just about every laptop I have ever seen? Anyway, you might want to consider blocking Windows update from doing anything automatically until things clear up.