Vista - Service Pack 2 - Why only prompted to install now?

Half an hour ago I downloaded and installed a bunch of security updates.

Then, in a effort to solve a monitor profile dumping problem that I'm having, I turned off Windows Defender and Windows Firewall. (I've written about this on another thread and, no, it didn't solve the problem)

Anyway, I then went to check my Update History to see if a certain update had been installed.

While there, I noticed that there were new updates available, namely, Service Pack 2.

All 567.3Mb of it are downloading as I speak - hopefully, Microsoft have solved this profiling cockup.

I note that the publication date for SP2 is 14/7/2009.

Why has it taken this long to appear in my available updates window?

Thanks.

D.

Service pack 2 detects incompatibility's in your machine and wont be offered until they are resolved .
So whatever they were have now been resolved (hopefully) meaning sp2 can now be installed

Sp2 only shows up when your pc is ready ....
When it shows up when your pc is not ready ....Then there will be a BIG problem ...
and alot of "Headache" ...
Hopefully it'll fix your bugs ...

I was prompted to install SP2, but when I read all the things that go back to MS I was a bit curious about it.


What are the advantages of installing it? Any disadvantages to not installing?

Thanks!

Ms Pugs

I have a serious problem with SP2 (a different thread) but I got online with MS and ran the utility they use to gather information -- and saved the output to a file.

It's literally nothing to worry about, just a list of hardware and software features, CPU type and speed, memory type and speed, network card ... stuff like that. It's essentially a text list of what you see in Device Manager.

It's not at all like their validation diag tool that goes rooting around your hard drives looking for copies of MS software and running validation checks on each item found.

Thanks for the info.
Makes me feel better.

My hubby tried to install it on his computer, and got a message that some driver might not be compatible.

He has a brand new 64 bit, Vista Home Premium laptop.

He just stopped the installation.

Do you know what that's all about?

ms pugs, Have a look in device manager and check whether any device has a yellow mark. There is obviously some driver it does not like. Did you install any exotic hardware?

Hi,

No exotic stuff.

The only yellow mark I saw was an exclamation mark next to a usb mass storage device.

I would suppose that is where he plugs in his flash drive.

Much too strange.

He uses his 'puter for work, so I don't like to play around with the settings much.

So there is hardly anything installed except for his work programs, and trust me, they're not anything exotic. Complicated, but not exotic, lol.

Update the driver where you saw the exclamation mark. That is probably the culprit.

A usb storage device has a driver?

Please bear with my ignorance, but how do I go about finding a driver for it?

thank you so much for your patience.

ms pugs