When I saw James Kendrick’s post on Vista SP1 hitting his HP Mini, I decided to be a little proactive about why SP1 wasn’t hitting my machine. I’d been wondering what in the world had been blocking Windows Update from delivering the Vista Service Pack 1 goodness that I’d been craving for the last month or so. I’d download every single possible update offered, optional or otherwise, and it still wasn’t popping. I finally came across this post by Nick White on the Vista Team Blog, in which he explains that any other language than the below five offered by Microsoft will be released in the second wave of updates in April.

Since I am running Vista Ultimate, I’d downloaded a language pack some time ago, and it turns out that as soon as I uninstalled it, the SP1 update came up in right after installing one minor update that hadn’t been offered before that.

SP1 is downloading as I write, and I’m looking forward to a leaner, meaner, mobile blogging machine!

Interestingly, my total download required was only around 65MB-as opposed to the max of 400+ MB. I guess all the updates I’d downloaded before that did do something.

UPDATE: Turns out there’s a specific post on the Vista Team Blog dedicated to this point, located here. They say that SP1 for the other 31 languages should be coming soon, although a hard date wasn’t provided.

FYI: Should you be truly desperate for SP1 on your machine and WU isn’t offering it up, you can download a standalone installer directly from MS by going to this page.

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