Vista - Vista hasn't updated since June last year

My friend has had this machine since the middle of last year. Updates have been failing to install or even download since SP1 failed to install. Due to my housemate not seeming to use any initiative in looking for a solution, I'll do it for him. I have included a Screenshot of the last time any updates were applied. As you can see there is an SP1 failure and the security update before that was the last successful actual Windows update to be applied. There is also another SP1 fail a few days before that too. The only updates after the SP1 failure are Defender updates and Office updates and these are all successful.

I have tried the instructions in http://www.vistax64.com/software-too...air-tools.html but none of those work (the first step is non-existant and when I try and install the Windows Update agent it just responds with the usual 0x8000FFFF (Catastrophic error i believe code). After doing the manual reset of the Windows Update and going to the inbuilt Windows Update it now comes up with the 0x8000FFFF error and says it can't search for updates which it was doing before. If this is the result of the failed SP1 update, is there anyway to remove the partially failed installed components of it? Any help would be great.

On the odd occasion the hard drives seem to 'spin up' causing a delay in either watching movies or doing anything relating to copying.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...tesFailure.jpg

The PC is running Vista Ultimate x86 and is a Quad core 6600. It's also a HP machine which I personally dislike and would never recommend these pre-built bloatware machines to anyone.