Digital Home Thoughts: I'm Giving Up: I Can't Get Vista SP1 Installed on my Laptop

Windows Vista with SP1 installed is a smoother ride than without SP1 installed - I particularly like being able to see accurate progress indications when I'm moving or copying files. SP1 doesn't add any new features to Windows Vista, but it improves the overall experience of using the OS. I have it running on all five desktop PCs in my home, but I've completely struck out trying to get it installed on my Dell XPS M1330 laptop. When SP1 first came out there were some issues with it not being compatible with certain hardware configurations, so when my first attempt to install it failed, I thought my M1330 might have had one of those particular hardware configurations that were affected.

When it started showing up in Windows Update for me on the M1330, I gave it a shot - and it still failed. This past week I decided to dig deeper into the problem and really figure out why it wasn't installing. Since the Windows Update mechanism wasn't installing it properly, I downloaded the big 400+ MB offline installer and gave that a try. It also failed on me, giving me the following error:



I investigated the page referred to in that error message (irritatingly, it wasn't a hyperlink, I had to manually type out that entire URL) and tried everything listed there. The full hard drive scan produced no improved results, nor did rebooting and shutting down running programs. I got a little excited when I saw that the system file checker found a problem, but it found a problem it couldn't fix! The exact error message seems like it's designed to frustrate:

"Verification 100% Complete. Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. Details are included in the CBS.log..."

I took a look at the CBS.log file, and it's 35 MB of non-user friendly text. There's no easy way to see what the problem is...and that's why I'm giving up on getting SP1 installed. I don't particularly feel motivated to format and re-install everything on this laptop because it would be a huge pain to do, so until SP2 comes out, I'll be leaving things as is. Unless someone has a cure for this problem that is...