David Flynn27 May 2009, 11:00 AM
Vista SP2 has gone live to the masses, but if you’ve used vLite to streamline Vista you could be facing a total reinstall of the OS from scratch.
Earlier this month Microsoft slid Vista SP2 out to its members-only MSDN subscription service, but overnight the service pack went live on the main Microsoft Download Centre hub and is expected to flow on to Windows Update next month.
Vista SP2, which also includes SP2 for Windows Server 2008 due to the fact that both the desktop and server OS share the same codebase, requires that SP1 is already installed on your PC.
But SP2 doesn’t play well with
vLite, the put-Vista-on-a-diet software which many to trim the OS back to size by removing unwanted components.
Microsoft’s even posted a
specific warning on this hurdle, which during the SP2 install tosses up the error message that “One or more system components that the service pack requires are missing”.
“This problem occurs because system components that are required to install Windows Vista SP2 are not present on your computer” Microsoft explains. “A common reason for this problem is that the vLite software was used to customise the Windows Vista installation and some required system components were removed.”
Ah, but there’s a solution. “To resolve this problem, use genuine Microsoft software media to reinstall Windows Vista with Service Pack 1 and then install Windows Vista SP2.” Of course – that makes everything
so easy!
You can grab the 32-bit edition of SP2 (a 348MB download) from
here, or click
here for the 64-bit (577MB) version.