Vista SP1 on HP laptops
After moving to a new HP laptop (notebook?) with preinstalled Windows Vista on it, I found it weird that it did not offer me to install the all new SP1 via Windows Update.
After some sniffing around I found out that your system needs to be in top shape to be eligible for update (all drivers up to date, etc. - find out more here) and as I found out, the Intel graphics driver for my 965 Express chipset is one of the problematic drivers (version 7.14.10.1322). Unfortunately, the driver on HP’s site is even older then my current one, so it seemed that HP just put a cap on the whole story. Fortunatelly I found a new driver on Intel’s Downloadcenter, which matched the version Vista was comfortable with. I couldn’t install it, of course, as it wasn’t an “original” HP driver, but I managed to work around that by extracting the files from the driver archive and updating the driver manually from Device Manager.
The next step was to restart and check Windows Update to see if it offers me the SP1 update… it did. After numerous unsuccessful attempts to download and install it, Windows Update gave me a nice error 80070570 and gave up on SP1. The other option was to manually download the SP1 from Microsoft’s site, which I did and installed it manually.
I’m running Vista with SP1 for a few hours now so I guess it works. Shame on HP though. And Microsoft.
I hope this proves useful for others as well… Don’t forget to back your stuff up and read the instructions before you begin updating.