SP1 has landed - Finally!

I was pleasantly surprised the other day when I was finally offered Windows Vista SP1. The surprise was really down to the fact that I still hadn't met the prerequisites for drivers that SP1 was previously looking for. I got one of the two drivers I was missing a couple of weeks back - a new version of the Sigmatel Audio driver (from Microsoft).

But as I wrote a while back, Microsoft Support (KB948343) said I needed a new UPEK Fingerprint Reader driver - which wasn't available from my manufacturer (Toshiba). It had been suggested to me that I just install the latest driver from the UPEK website - they have v2.10 build 118 available, whereas I have v1.9.2.74 - the latest available through Toshiba.

But I wasn't really THAT keen. BSODing my primary laptop wasn't really a good option for me - so I was waiting for updated drivers to be available through the OEM (as MS said there were issues with drivers pre-v1.9.2.99).

So when Windows Update offered me SP1 I went looking. Had I Windows-Updated the UPEK driver without knowing? Nope. Nothing had changed. Going back to KB948343 to double check - and that entry has gone. It's no longer a troublesome driver apparently. What? How is that possible? Either SP1 + bad driver = BSOD or it doesn't, surely.

So I tried searching around for a while to see if anyone else had experienced any issues, but couldn't find anything (Theory: If it's not Googleable then it doesnt exist). I then decided to proceed with the Service Pack update - but only following a couple of hours of extra backups to both another PC and an external HDD.

I guess the only stand out thing with this Service Pack, from all the (seems like 1000s of) other ones I've done in the past is that it took AGES. It said allow 1 hour or something, but I'm sure it took 2. A really long time anyway. But when everything came back without a problem I was happy. And from the relatively short time I've been using it, I'm sure its working faster than before. My niggly Outlook 2007 freezing on startup problem has gone away too, which is great.

I'll continue to keep my eye on it for a while before officially declaring it a success, but I'm happy for the time being. Yay!