Submitted by Microsoft has announced that the first service pack release for Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 will hit the download servers starting today. The company had already released the final code to OEM partners earlier on February 9, followed by MSDN customers, TechNet subscribers and volume licensing customers on February 16, but now anyone will be able to get it either via Microsoft’s Download Center website or through Windows Update.
I installed in on Friday, and have noticed no issues. My only nagging complaint I had with 7 was weird behavior playing my favorite podcast with WMP, and that seems to be resolved.
You been lucky, there is tons of problems reported all over internet. It seems that there is performance drops with non-Microsoft databases and other products. There is also situations where servers have deactivated. Also some updates have caused servers to go BSOD limbo and only solution is to reinstall whole server.
How about booting WinPE or Linux for an emergency registry edit? Just disable the faulty driver or service and you’re fine. Logical, but unsupported.
Personally I hate Windows for hiding all the stuff a normal system engineer must have access to. The Windows(tm) way is always backup your system before installing anything and revert in case of problems, or reinstall.
You have to live with it, the system is crap.
Exactly who on the Internet is running 7 as a server?
This is nothing but trolling to the N’th degree…..
This update is for 2008 R2 as well.
2.5 GB download for SP1 on Win7 ?
The above quote from my boss pretty much sums up my concerns.
2.5GB is about right for the combined download for all architectures, x86, x64, and ia64.
For an x86 install, look for “windows6.1-KB976932-X86.exe”. That weighs in at a little over 537 MB.
If your system is up to date then, by using Windows Update you will be downloading only 80MB-ish. Yeah, it’s “Huuuge”
An ISO with all versions that’s been available from MSDN and Technet for a few days is 1.9GB in size.
That’s x86, x64, and ia64 combined.
The thing took forever to download. Windows Update said it was going to download 87.2 MB on my x64 Ultimate 7, but I’ve downloaded full 700 MB ISO images much faster than this download. Installation also took forever, followed by an eternal restart with the message “Configuring service pack. Do not power off your computer.” It all took much longer than installing Windows 7 from scratch.
And all that for what? NOTHING USEFUL! Microsoft, if you guys want to make service pack the “minor, less-impacting updates” you said they would be, then they better not impact my time like that. If you are going to take forever and ever to download and install a service pack, then there better be something worth showing for in it!
Edited 2011-02-23 18:04 UTC
I just installed it on two computers through windows update. Both have fairly new installations of windows 7.
On my desktop computer with w7 pro x64 everything just worked. It didn’t take long and after a reboot I had SP1 installed!
On my laptop with w7 x32 ultimate however the installation took so long that I left it for while. When I got back it had crashed with a black screen. Now it’s stuck in a semi functional state. It boots to the desktop but windows update wont run and I’m unable to restart the service, and on every shutdown it hangs on configuring updates.
Well, I guess some things never change.
I have a 6-core, 12GB RAM machine with very fast hard drives and Win 7 SP1 installed via Windows Update is literally an exercise in paint-drying (or hard disk activity light watching, take your pick).
It seems to download from the Akamai caching servers in multiple large chunks, before unpacking each chunk with much disk thrashing and CPU usage – must have been 20-30 mins in total. As another poster said, even the shutdown afterwards is several more minutes of thrashing/CPU hogging and I’m expecting more on the next Win 7 boot afterwards (I’m back in Fedora 14 to retain my sanity for the moment).
Microsoft did miss a trick – on multiple core machines, they should have dedicated a thread to downloading, whilst hammering the other cores unpacking any completed downloads – I’m sure they could have halved the install time that way.