Why SP1 may not be available for you and how to get it

[Animalzilla1]

As far as I'm aware , this is the correct one for the disk, pre installed for me, they gave me the disk with the PC ... So have they messed up?

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

Do a Trendmicro free scan for boot sector virus or Trojan Horses first.

Did you change the motherboard, CPU, RAM, hard drive, or video card? If yes, what?

 

[Animalzilla1]

A what scan? when?

I've not changed anything what so ever, this pc came with
ASUS M2N-E Sli board, nVidia chipset, BFG 8800GTX Graphics, a 500GB HDD and the rest is intergrated on the board

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

www.trendmicro.com free virus scan. See what it finds. A boot sector virus or Trojan Horse can cause your issues.

Did you overclock anything or change any BIOS settings?

 

[Animalzilla1]

I have not changed any settings, nothing is overclocked, that I'm aware of, BIOS has been Flashed on recommendation by ASUS

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

BIOS upgrade is fine. Use the Asus drivers for Vista. See what they recommend for your board.

 

[Animalzilla1]

this is a nightmare, I cant use trendmicro because I dont have Java, I cant get Java because apparently my browser wont let me, I have no firewalls, no antivirus no nothing !

 

[Animalzilla1]

right, Right, I just downloaded Firefox and even that wont connect to the net, something is definately wrong here, Here goes another FORMAT! ... I'll update you with progress once I actually have some

 

[Animalzilla1]

Finally, Success! SP1 has installed!
It only took another Format, and now allowing Vista to install any drivers what so ever. straight through all the updates and SP1 went in first time.

So, it would seem the trick is to do like you say... clean install... get SP1 straight away.

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

I usually get the media kit with the service packs integrated into the base install. I used Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 DVD. Install all your patches and updates. Then, install anti-virus.

 

[Animalzilla1]

it just seems odd to me that a service pack was created but can only be installed while the system has nothing on it. Maybe you're right, its the drivers written by 3rd parties that cause these issues.

The next test is to play Call of Duty 4 and see if I'm still getting crashes

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

The problem is the service pack is laying down new drivers for everything. I had issues with XP SP2 installing in the past. Microsoft gets the drivers from the manufacturers. They test on a clean install only to sign them. If something is in conflict, they might not install. They can't test for conflicts because of all the hardware on the market. It could be security issues with Vista stopping the install properly.

 

[Animalzilla1]

Well, if that's how it's done the I think MS should tell people this information before people can attempt to install SP1 for Vista, If I had known I had to do it stright from a clean install, I could have saved days and had it in first time.


I have at least learned something , which is no bad thing

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

Most can do it without a clean install. I usually like to do it on a clean install to get rid of all the crap. I backup to a HP LTO-3 400GB tape drive at home.

The biggest thing to learn is not get frustrated. I run a corporate network. I have a new rack, N+1 UPS, 6 HP Proliant servers and other hardware coming in 3 weeks. Four servers have a pair of quad core Xeons. One is 64-bit SQL Server with 18GB of RAM. The servers are diskless on a 2012FC SAN. I learned to do things in a certain order.

1.) Firmware CD
2.) Latest drivers
3.) documenting all my settings in a engineering notebook.

My home workstation was down for 2 months with hardware issues. I lost my 18 drive SCSI RAID arrays around Christmas. I replaced all my hardware. Spend a lot of money doing it. Still had problems with 3Ware 9690SA SAS RAID controller. I returned it and replaced it with a LSI Logic 8708EM2. I still can't figure out why the SCSI RAID failed. None of the drives were bad. Replaced backplanes and cables. The 3Ware 9690SA used Seagate Savvio 146GB drives. One drive has a predicative failure flag =1. The 9690SA would not fail the RAID 1 array with the drive in failure mode. The 9690SA was returned. The 8708EM2 would not load this drive. I RMAed it with less than 20 hours on it. Still have not installed the returned drive.

 

[Animalzilla1]

WOW, that's a lot of hardware.
I think I would go crazy trying to get all that working, I have issues with just 2 pc's and a laptop lol

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

My home workstation is for A/V and CAD work. It was designed around Photoshop CS2. I am waiting for CS4.


The corporate network has 27 SQL databases and 300GB of data.

 

[Animalzilla1]

Well if you work with it every day I guess it gets a little easier.

I still have my game crash issue, I thin its down to nvd3dum.dll An NVidia file. I still cant change it in the system folder

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

Try the latest drivers from Nvidia.

 

[Animalzilla1]

They are, I've been looking in a few forums and there does not seem to be a fix for it what so ever. One or 2 people have gone from Dual channel RAM to single and that works but I cant see it being a hardware issue.

 

[SCSIraidGURU]

Could be a BIOS conflict with dual channel and your video drivers. Contact your motherboard manufacturer about it.