Vista SP1 Driver Problems
Wednesday 13th February, 2008 09:42 Comments: 0
Microsoft recently tried to clarify the situation by stating that there were problems with drivers not working after the update was installed. Mike Nash from Microsoft's Windows product management group said there were no problems when Vista SP1 was shipped pre-installed, but it seems that SP1 messes up the drivers during the SP1 update process. The advice is currently to uninstall and re-install the drivers (not difficult for me, but not so trivial for non-technical users).
I think I know what they mean by driver problems, as I've been running SP1 RC for a while (the first version, not the refresh they did fairly recently IIRC), and one of the quirks I've noticed is that my screen doesn't always redraw properly. This was most noticeable when I locked the computer, as the screen would go black, and if I moved the cursor or type something you could see the text box for the passwor, but the pretty background was absent. Also, sometimes IE wouldn't redraw the web page properly, resulting in a "see through" browser in places. I uninstalled my graphics card on the system running the SP1 RC (Intel 965 integrated graphics) and hoped it'd reintallt the right driver. It failed to find a suitable driver, so I ended up downloading the very latest one from the Intel website instead, and everything appears to be running fine now.
Well, possibly aside from one bug. My laptop has crashed a couple of times trying to resume from hibernate, according to Microsoft there's a hotfix that solves the problem (which I think appears to be using hibernate with a wireless network card), but when I tried to install the update it told me that the update didn't apply (I'm not sure if that means it's already part of SP1 or just that the build number didn't match or something?). But it hasn't happened since I reinstalled the graphics card driver, so it's possible that I won't see this error again. Time will tell. And hopefully in a couple weeks time I'll finally be able to grab SP1 via Technet. I could probably obtain SP1 from elsewhere, but I prefer to grab my Windows binary files from reputable sources (e.g. Microsoft's Download Center, Technet Subscriber Downloads).
I think I know what they mean by driver problems, as I've been running SP1 RC for a while (the first version, not the refresh they did fairly recently IIRC), and one of the quirks I've noticed is that my screen doesn't always redraw properly. This was most noticeable when I locked the computer, as the screen would go black, and if I moved the cursor or type something you could see the text box for the passwor, but the pretty background was absent. Also, sometimes IE wouldn't redraw the web page properly, resulting in a "see through" browser in places. I uninstalled my graphics card on the system running the SP1 RC (Intel 965 integrated graphics) and hoped it'd reintallt the right driver. It failed to find a suitable driver, so I ended up downloading the very latest one from the Intel website instead, and everything appears to be running fine now.
Well, possibly aside from one bug. My laptop has crashed a couple of times trying to resume from hibernate, according to Microsoft there's a hotfix that solves the problem (which I think appears to be using hibernate with a wireless network card), but when I tried to install the update it told me that the update didn't apply (I'm not sure if that means it's already part of SP1 or just that the build number didn't match or something?). But it hasn't happened since I reinstalled the graphics card driver, so it's possible that I won't see this error again. Time will tell. And hopefully in a couple weeks time I'll finally be able to grab SP1 via Technet. I could probably obtain SP1 from elsewhere, but I prefer to grab my Windows binary files from reputable sources (e.g. Microsoft's Download Center, Technet Subscriber Downloads).