Insomnia

Those that have been reading my blog for a little while will remember that my wife has been having all sorts of trouble with her HP desktop computer with Vista on it. The reliability of the machine has been so bad that I decided to install the release candidate of Vista SP1 when it became available. That improved things slightly but the computer still couldn't properly shut down 2 times out of 3.

Well, the release candidate started complaining that it was not going to be supported anymore and that I had to install the real thing. So, on a rainy morning this weekend I started the process that would eventually take over 4 hours of my life.

The first step was to remove the outdated version of the the service pack. After some Googling to make sure that I was removing the right update I started the removal process. The first time, the machine froze and it had to retrieve a restore point to recover. The second time, the removal succeeded. But alas, the service pack did not show up in the Windows update dialog. Instead, Vista informed me that there were 19 updates to download and install first. I started the process and the computer froze at the 3rd update. I had to force a reboot of the machine and Vista retrieved another restore point. Back to square one.

Looking at the install log yielded no useful information. I turned to the HP web site for help. After describing the computer model and navigating to the support and downloads page. I was informed that I had to update drivers for SP1 to install properly on this hardware. No less than 6 driver updates were critical or recommended for this particular model of computer. From the Video card to the SATA drivers without forgetting a good old BIOS update. Each one of those updates had to be downloaded and installed individually. And each one required a reboot after installation.

An hour later, I was able to apply the 19 updates that would not apply before. After those 19, there were 3 more that appeared. And finally, Windows update offered SP1 for my installing pleasure.

So why the big rant? Is it just me or was this a really big missed opportunity by the hardware vendor? That PC came with a disk full of crappy software I didn't want. What if HP had invested some money and offered real value to their customers? What if they invested to streamline the delivery of critical driver updates. The same way Microsoft does it with its Windows updates. Something that a normal consumer, one without a degree in computer science, could understand. Something that didn't require me spending 4 hours on a weekend watching my computer reboot.

Interestingly, my Dell laptop had a different issue with a similar resolution. I was having trouble with the sleep/hibernate functions and I had to update the BIOS and Video drivers from the Dell site. The process was not much easier but at least, the hardware didn't hang while applying updates.

Labels: Vista

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