I woke up this morning and I thought the first thing I’ll do is update both my work PCs to Windows Vista Service pack 1 (SP1). For those of you who missed it, Windows Vista SP1 was released on March 18th. I have been a beta tester for Microsoft for many years now and I have been impressed with Vista SP1 on my notebook. I must say I was surprised when they released SP1 to manufacturers and didn’t allow the people who have been beta testing it and providing feedback to update properly at that time. Actually that’s not quite true, they allowed premium paying beta testers to upgrade. Any other beta testers were made to wait until SP 1 was made available to the public.

So anyway, the first PC I thought I’d install it on was the gaming PC, the bat. It has Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit installed on it, with all previous updates done. I downloaded Windows SP 1, ran the program and received an error, telling me that I was using the wrong language pack. Wait, hang on a second, I am using an English copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. Upon searching Microsoft FAQs, I discovered that if you have any other language packs installed, you need to uninstall them before you install SP1, because SP1 only supports English, German, Japanese, French and Spanish.

I had installed all of the language packs previously because of a bloody pop-up that kept telling me that updates were available, because all of the different language packs were considered to be updates. I could have turned off the notification or disabled it for those particular packs, but at the time, I saw no harm in installing them. Plus, from time to time, I do like to access websites published in different languages, and translate them. So I installed all of the 35 language packs available.

When Vista SP1 said I needed to uninstall the unsupported language packs, I went to Control Panel > Features and Programs and … there were no language packs there. No problems > check installed updates. When I looked through the list of all installed updates, guess what? No language packs. Now I know I installed the language packs through Windows Updates. It would make perfect sense that if you install any Microsoft Updates using Microsoft Updates that they would be listed under installed Microsoft Updates, wouldn’t it?!

So, I went back to the FAQs, dumbfounded about not being able to find where the list of language packs is. Turns out it in Clocks, Language, and Region. If you click on Change Display language, it’s there that it gives you an install and uninstall language option. This was not always the case. The language packs were definitely in the add/remove programs section at one stage during the initial months of Vista and also right after I first installed them.

Microsoft in their infinite wisdom found this new home for them, which requires even an experienced computer user to go through their FAQs to find out where they’re hidden. So, I clicked the remove languages button, ticked all the languages that I didn’t want, clicked next and waited. About ten minutes later, the computer re-booted. When I went back into the languages section, it informed me that I had successfully uninstalled one language. The other thirty language packs did not uninstall. I tried it a couple of more times and each time found that only one language pack uninstalled at a time. And it takes a long time to remove each language pack. No problems, I thought, I’ll keep uninstalling all of them one by one and go and work on my laptop – maybe write up a blog about the experience.

I downloaded SP1 on the laptop and went to install it. It came up with an error message telling me that I already have SP1. I do have SP1 beta, which I installed on January 28th. You would think that Microsoft’s install program would be smart enough to detect that it’s not the final version and then update it appropriately. But no. No problems, I uninstalled the beta SP1. This time around, it was in the logical place and the Add/Remove option was available in the Programs and Features section of Control Panel. 45 minutes later, it’s still uninstalling and I’m typing this blog out on one of the only PCs left in the labs that’s not been out of action this morning – it’s running XP.