Vista Woes - Help?

OK, I got my new notebook today, which came with Vista Home Premium, but I am posting this from my XP Pro notebook and am about 30 minutes from blowing away both partitions on the new notebook and installing XP on it.

I tried pulling down the updates from Microsoft. Some failed, others show as canceled. I cannot get any of those to reload/reinstall.

Anyone know how to make either Microsoft Update or Windows Update actually work on Vista?

 

Are you running behind a router or firewall? Are you running from a wireless connection? If so what's the signal strength, "Low, Med, High"? Also have you checked to see why updates have canceled or failed? i.e. no drivers available or possibly UAC did not allow for updates to be processed.

UAC is a little finicky right now as it doesn't trust changes to the computer. I usually turn off UAC whenever i'm updating my PC from a place I trust, like Microsoft.

 

If it's an 80070103 error (to confirm just check your update history) then the reason why they won't reinstall is a good one -- it's because you already have the driver installed.

It's happened to me a couple of times, where Windows Update would detect a newer driver and try to install it, but would invariably fail, because it's trying to install something that's already on the system. For example it happened when I first plugged in the Xbox 360controller. Once Vista detected it it automatically installed the software, then the second time I plugged it in for some reason Windows Update tried to install the software again under the guise of "detecting a new driver". This has also happened with my printer (HP PSC 2110).

Part and parcel of a new OS, I guess...

 

Well, after twice resetting the Vista partition to factory specs I got past it. The frustrations of the new, I guess.