I was lucky enough to recover from a display driver problem in the middle of the SP1 update process on my HP HDX9203 “Dragon” yesterday, only  to have Windows Update inform me that the install process had failed. I tried again, and it worked on the second try. I’ve had other Service Pack installs go south on older Windows versions (particularly Vista) where the outcome was much less pretty: a complete re-install was the only way I could recover from a mid-stream failure with Vista SP1 on a test machine. As far as I’m concerned this particular outcome was much more positive and far less traumatic!

That said, I also noticed that Ed repoorted that when he ran the Windows Update Troubleshooter (Control Panel, Troubleshooting, System and Security, Windows Update) that it came back and told him it had found and fixed some minor problems with Windows Update. “Hmmm.” I wondered to myself “Is that just his machine, or all Windows machines?” Here’s what pops up as a result of that repair, BTW:

This popped up on every single Windows 7 machine on which I installed SP1

While I can’t say for sure that *all* PCs to which Windows 7 SP1 is applied will need such repair, all 6 of my currently available PCs (I have one out on loan, and one temporarily out of service waiting for a motherboard replacement) found something to fix with Windows Update this morning when I ran the utility on those machines. I finished installing Windows 7 SP1 on those machines yesterday, and today the repairs all took root.

To me, this suggests that Windows 7 machines against which SP1 has been applied should also be subjected to the Windows Update Troubleshooter treatment — at least, those machines that use Windows Update to keep themselves current on Microsoft’s latest security patches and other updates. Think of it as a “just in case” maneuver and you may be able to avoid trouble later that you surely won’t want to shoot if and when it might occur!