Greetings all,

I re-installed Vista on a relative's PC last night. I ran Windows update continuously until there were no more updates to download. However, when I go to system properties, it still says "Windows Vista Home Premium" rather than "Home Premium Service Pack 2".

How can I tell if the PC is actually up-to-date or not? Windows Update continues to deny the existence of further updates...

Have you activated Vista? You normally only get security fixes, not enhancements or features, until it is activated.

Yep, it was the first thing I did after installing so I could install MSE.

Two question spring to mind.

Would SP2 show up in the add/remove programs list, (you might need to tick the show updates box)?

Is it worth trying to download and install it anyway? I'm guessing it would say "SP already installed" or something similar, wouldn't it?

Hope this helps.

Let us know how you get on.

A manual download and installation of both SP1 and SP2 sorted it. Stupid Windows Update.

I thought I'd read somewhere that SP2 wasn't being put out as a forced update yet, which might have explained it... then again i couldbe wrong.

Bah Vista.

Why not 7?

Because 7's just Vista with better marketing.

It should say what version it is running in System Information (control panel). If it doesn't mention a service pack it is probably vanilla.

Yeah okay Gav.

.....

I actually agree with Gav on this, 7 is Vista with bells and whistles. And anyway, this laptop has an OEM licence for Vista, hence Vista.

Well I'm going to have to disagree. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been. Vista gives me that feeling of impending doom "oh god it's crashing " - "oh no, I'm just opening an app and it's locked down the whole screen for approval"

It's an embarrassment.

Windows 7 has exactly the same behaviour.

Windows 7 isn't as bad as Vista was. That said, once Vista was set up and running, the requests for Admin privileges were only needed when installing new applications or drivers or for trying to run poorly written software. Exactly the same areas that Linux and UNIX have also always asked for similar permissions (su/sudo). The only difference, with Vista, was that it locked all input, until the user accepted/rejected the action. With Windows 7, it at least hold the request in the background, until the user wants to deal with it...

As to crashing, I've never seen Vista or Windows 7 crash (I had Vista on about 8 different systems and I have rolled out around 20 different Windows 7 machines - some upgrades, some new machines.

Well no, 7 doesn't give that feeling of impending doom as the screen flickers and then finally locks down. It does ask for authorisation, but it does it more nicely.

Add to that quicker boot times, and a few little bits, and overall I'd say it's always worth installing 7 over Vista.