Vista SP1, where are you?

Windows Vista ServicePack 1 was released a few weeks ago, and I have been eagerly waiting for it to show up in my list of updates to be installed. Several of my friends have already installed it, but I am still waiting for it to appear…

So I decided to do a little research and discover exactly why I wasn’t being offered the upgrade. Of course, I could have just downloaded it and installed it myself, but I was curious as to why my Windows Update didn’t appear to be working.

Well, it turns out that there are a number of reasons why I wasn’t seeing SP1 as an available upgrade. After reading the support article, poking through the version numbers for a bunch of drivers I discovered that I had a “problematic” driver – “SigmaTel Stwrt.sys – version 6.10.5511.0 or earlier for x86 computers” to be exact.

So the first thing I do is head over to Sony‘s web site and look for an updated driver, but of course it doesn’t exist. The most recent driver on offer is over a year old and is the one I already have that is preventing SP1 from installing.

Second stop is SigmaTel‘s website, and a Vista Support Update link – now we’re getting somewhere! But hang on – this just tells me to go to my PC vendor and get an updated driver from them! It appears that SigmaTel has been bought out by IDT and they are no longer supporting the audio chipset in my laptop.

It would seem that I cannot install Vista SP1 on my laptop, due to a single “problematic” driver that is no longer supported by the device manufacturer (SigmaTel/IDT) or the OEM (Sony). What exactly does “problematic” mean? Will my computer fail to boot, go Bluescreen of Death on me or worse? Or is it something I really couldn’t care less about, like the sound card won’t reinitialize correctly after resuming from hibernation? Will it work? Do I dare install it, only to find out that I’ve just turned my laptop into a useless brick?

Unfortunately, it’s rather difficult to pin the blame on a single entity. Is it Microsoft‘s fault for failing to write a proper service pack? Perhaps they had a very good reason, such as a security issue and the driver no longer works after the issue was fixed? Is it SigmaTel‘s fault for selling the chipset to another company? Is it IDT‘s fault for not writing an up to date driver? Or is Sony to blame, since they are using the technology in their computers and should provide an OEM driver?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who is at fault – the customers are getting the short end of the stick. And this doesn’t just affect Sony customers, but also Dell, HP and any other vendor that used these very popular audio chipsets.

But the worst part is not that this problem exists, but that Windows Update does not even show SP1 as an option. Hundreds of users are not even going to know that there is a service pack available, let alone to try to update their drivers first! There is no indication whatsoever that a service pack is available, leaving many people completely in the dark.

It’s really quite difficult to Cheerlead things like this. I just hope it gets sorted out soon, but I’m not going to hold my breath…

And in the meantime, there are hundreds of customers – including myself  – that cannot install Vista SP1.

Recovery Coasters

It’s been a while since my last post (almost a month by my calculations),so I thought I’d write about something that happened this Thanksgiving weekend.

My father-in-law bought a new  Sony laptop and wanted to reconfigure the RAID to provide 2 separate drives (C: and D:) instead of a single large C: drive. So, I burned the recovery DVD’s, then restarted the computer, changed the RAID configuration in the BIOS, and booted from the recovery DVD.

At this point, we were presented with a screen that said something along the lines of “No Windows Vista installations were found”. This was quite expected, since we had modified the RAID configuration and weren’t really expecting to see anything useful on the drives.

The real surprise came when we were unable to actually use the restore disks to restore the system. The RAID drivers for the Intel Matrix Storage Manager coud not be found on the disk, and the versions that I tried from Intels website didn’t work either. After an hour on the phone with Sony Tech Support, I was told that I would have to call back on Monday morning to have my support call “elevated”. Hmm, so we’re supposed to sit and look at a $2, 500 brick all Thanksgiving weekend? Yay.

On a whim, I tried to install Vista from my own (non-OEM) DVD, and then use the activation code from the bottom of the laptop to activate it. Well, the official Vista installation media from Microsoft recognized the RAID and installed just fine! Unfortunately, the activation code wasn’t recognized as being valid, but after a quick phone call to India Microsoft and a brief explanation of the issue, our brand new laptop was up and running with a plain vanilla Vista Ultimate installation, just as God intended.

The best part of this of course, is that my father-in-law now has a laptop with multiple hard drives configured for his needs, none of the cruft that comes with an OEM install and a perfectly legal installation of Vista Ultimate.