A month after my first try, yesterday I tried again. I started at 8:30pm stopping all useless programs (RSS Readers, Outlook, Skype, Gtalk, MSN Messenger and all that sort of stuff). Then I stopped almost all window services running, and cleaned all the temp folders (one of which still contained some stuff - 430Mb -  remaining from the other try).

Ready, set, go!!!

15 minutes for the patch to extract itself to a temp folder, then other 10 minutes for the MSI to configure itself. Finally I get the "Do you want to install the Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005..."? I click yes and I go and watch the sunset (yes, in NZ the sunset is at 9pm :-)) and drink a good glass of NZ Pinot Noir (well, actually more than one :-)) with Nic and his wife Leonie, which are hosting me in their lovely house till I find my own.

Two hours and half after I launched the installation I get a popup saying that it needs some more space to continue with the process. Well, it's funny since I had almost 2Gb available on the disk before starting: I move a folder on another drive and then everything works fine. And at 11:30pm, 3 hours since the beginning, I had the SP1 installed on my laptop.

Then today, I decided to install the SP1 also on my machine at work, on Vista. I launched it this afternoon before leaving from work. I hope tomorrow morning everything will be fine, so that I can install, as suggested by some, also the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta.

Here are some links that explain better the problem I had during the installation:

 

PS: as you may have noticed, with this post I started to use the XFN stuff available in the WLW plugin package available on CodePlex and the XFN relationship addin for Subtext.