Windows Vista Service Pack Problems

Posted by packetmad as OS, Windows

Something went wrong with my gaming PC recently and it started BSODing on a regular basis. During these crashes I managed to lose or corrupt something in Vista.

I went for a clean install after searching a bunch of forum posts, few of which helped.
Most said my memory was suspect, but my GTX260′s fan wasn’t spinning up so I figured that was the problem. Yay for more expensive.

Anyway, the problem with the re-install was applying service packs. What a piece of work this turned out to be.

I installed a spare 7600GT video card and removed half my RAM just to make sure RAM wasn’t the issue. The PC started failing to boot with the GTX installed leading me to the spare. With half the RAM (4GB) installed, everything was working ok except for the SP installs.

I finally got SP1 to install without some sort of 0×0 error or the “Windows Module Installer has stoppped working” error.

I did this with 3 simple steps:

1. Installed/Ran the Microsoft readiness utility
2. Disabled the Windows Error Reporting Service
3. Installing the stand alone SP1 executable

Now on to SP2.