November 3, 2008, 12:20 pm
I had some time last week to get to the root of a recent installation problem. On my work system running Server 2003, the installation package for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 would fail repeatedly. This was the case using either the Microsoft Update or standalone MSI download. Since service packs for Visual Studio are generally a Good Idea, this was a seriously annoying inconvenience - not the least of which was seeing the “one remaining update” icon in the system tray.
In any event, I managed to pick the correct answer out of the Web from Egghead Cafe, which pointed to KB925336 from Microsoft’s site. There are packages for Server 2003 in 32-bit, x64 and Itanium versions. Since I know a number of developers run the server OS (through MSDN usually), this seems to be a worthwhile fix.
Note that the package does require a reboot before Service Pack 1 will install properly.
February 5, 2008, 12:31 am
The big news today (well, yesterday by the time this goes live) was that Windows Vista SP1 had released to manufacturing. Annoyingly enough, this doesn’t mean it’s available for public download yet, and end users will have to wait until in mid-March from Windows Update, or mid-April through Automatic Updates. I’ll keep my eye out for a validated copy from sources with access to the original MSDN files, because SP1 allegedly fixes some of the network copy issues I’ve been having recently.
As background, the network copy issues seem to involve Vista’s auto network tuning utility. I have a gigabit Ethernet connection between my Windows Home Server box and my primary Core2Quad system, and get about 40-50MB/s read speed without tweaking them using XP SP2 or Leopard clients. Vista, on the same Core2Quad and a 10K RPM Raptor drive, taps out at about 9MB/s and is often much slower than that, which is incredibly painful when working with 4+GB MKV files.
SP1 releases, at least with recent Microsoft products, have heralded new standards of stability and less crashiness. (SP2 really went above and beyond in fulfilling this role for XP, but it was an exception since it added additional security capabilities.)
The more interesting post of the day, though, is from Mark Russinovich’s blog in which he discusses the lower-level details of file copy operations. It’s definitely worth a read if you’re of the computer science mindset, and goes a long way to explaining some of the more intricate changes to Vista SP1.