My baby survived the Windows Vista SP1 install

As you'll recall, back in December I purchased a Dell XPS 420 then posted comments about my new toy.  There was a lot of interest in that post and it received a lot of comments from the community. Since December, my baby has been running all of my applications very nicely.  I'm still on Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and the last clean install I did was the early part of January.

I've refused to add any updates or applications that were beta.  The only exception I made was for Expression Encoder v2 Beta.  I needed it to crank out a big project which is discussed at my post titled, "How Do You Learn?"  That encoding job took 5 hours on my quad proc machine.  Imagine if I had used my laptop.  Toast. 

I've been tempted by all sorts of interesting betas but have managed to keep my temptations in check.  Because I knew SP1 was being delivered to the world today, I did a nice little Ghost backup of my machine yesterday and waited for the announcement today.  Funny, I just noticed they jumped from Ghost v12.0 to v14.0.  What happened to v13.0 ???  The ghost guys are apparently superstitious.  That's what they get for playing with ghosts too much.

Ok, back on topic.  I downloaded the standalone installer from https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=874a414b-32b2-41cc-bd8b-d71eda5ec07c&DisplayLang=en then let it rip.  It completed without issue in less than an hour.  My XPS 420 is still able to watch and record premium high definition content delivered courtesy of Verizon FIOS TV.  I am glad that still works.  Otherwise you would have seen a grown man cry.  Grin. 

I expect all of my other applications to continue to work but I have not had a chance to test them all.  I'm testing some other stuff that gets released to the world tomorrow.  Hint hint. 

[UPDATE for 3/21/2008] Right after I did this install, I went out of town so I didn’t get a chance to really shake it down properly.  It became apparent this morning that my machine doesn’t like SP1.  It would freeze then unfreeze.  I would see the NVIDIA video driver crash and recover.  HD playback wasn’t good.  So I restored my Ghost backup (that I took just before applying SP1).  I have reported it issues internally and hopefully Dell and Microsoft can reproduce the problems then come up with a solution.  I won’t be testing SP1 on my personal machine until I get a strong indication that things are resolved.  I have way too much video work right now and I need it to be stable.