The Internets are abuzz with the news that Microsoft has finally released the first service pack to its widely successful Windows Vista, just one year (plus change) after it first hit retail store shelves.

As a user of Windows Vista Ultimate, I watched the service pack through its beta period with interest. As I’ve mentioned before, Windows and I don’t always see eye-to-eye, so I decided it best to refrain from installing an unstable, pre-release quality operating system on my production machine — a MacBook Pro.

So, I grabbed the Service Pack 1 updater from Microsoft. Weighing in at over 400 MB, the download took roughly an hour to complete. I giddily started the installation at a quarter past 11 PM; after a few reboots during the install process, I was greeted with a fresh view of Windows:

It isn’t often that a 255 by 139 pixel screenshot conveys so many layers of information. Your eye might first be drawn to the third line of text, suggesting that I have pirated Windows. Not so — in fact, my cell phone shows that I placed a 6 minute, 17 second call to Microsoft’s activation center at 8:50 PM, when I activated Windows for the nth time. The update seems to have deactivated my install; I haven’t tried to activate for the (n + 1)th time to see if it will work.

Second, you might notice that the time is 3:06 AM. That’s right — it took four hours to get me back into Windows. Consider that a fresh Windows Vista install takes around 45 minutes (if I remember correctly); OS X takes around 20. Never mind why I’m up at 3 AM on a school night, four hours is a ridiculous amount of time for a system update.

Third, the well-informed reader will note that the build number in the screenshot, 6000, does not match the build number of Windows Vista SP 1, which is 6001. That’s right. After four excruciating hours, the install failed — with no particularly informative error message. I can’t find the exact error number in my Windows logs, but there are thousands of entries at 3:01:37, all reading

Windows Servicing failed to complete the process of setting package
Package_82_for_KB936330~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.0.1.18000 () into Staged(Staged) state

Finally, we note that the screenshot has a hideous red outline. I couldn’t figure out how the equivalent of print screen on my MacBook Pro keyboard, so I used the “Snipping Tool.”