An Interesting Vista Update phenomenon

Posted on: September 16th, 2008

After a clean system restore on a Vista computer I proceeded to get it up-to-date with the patches. First it seemed to go but when the computer restarted most of the updates failed to install. The error code was: 800F0826. After a bit of Google-ing I was able to translate what this error message means: “The update failed because an earlier update which it depended upon was not installed”. Microsoft’s troubleshooting suggested to go back in the history and find out the first one that failed with a different error code than 800F0826.

Very inconveniently, in the update history you’d need to right-click on each item to find out the details. Anyways, in my each and every one of the updates failed with 800F0826. So what now? Even the first one failed because of a dependency? Makes no sense.

I could go back and reinstall Vista, hoping next time the update will work. However I don’t like this type of extra work. So I started experimenting. I went and looked up the available updates. There was 63 at the time. I sorted them by publish date. Unselected them all and selected the oldest “important” update. I ran the update on that single one. It succeeded and after the reboot the number of updates decreased finally by one!

I thought I might just be out of the woods and ran the update with the remaining 62. Nope. Every single one of them failed!

Next try: I ran an update on the oldest 5 important updates in the line-up. And some more. I got the number of updates down to 53. So I thought it should go through now. Well not according to Vista’s logic. All 53 failed with the same error code.

So I chipped away with 5,6 or 7 updates at a time. Finally I found what the problem was caused by. I disabled the useless Windows Defender service which is now an unremovable part of Windows! One of the updates were for Windows Defender, because the service was not running it failed. Somehow, it made the other updates fail in the same batch, even though they did not depend on it because I was able to eventually install everything but this WD update.

It makes absolutely no sense to me and I wish there was some kind of fix – which I did not find during my Google-ing. Microsoft suggestion was only a hint, at best but otherwise useless. And the others mainly referenced back to that one MS knowledge base article.

Even though I have to work more and more with Vista machines I still do not like Vista – two years after I’ve first sat in front of a Vista machine. Fortunately I know how to build a computer so if I need a new computer I don’t have to buy one with Vista. I don’t mind the pretty user interface but the bad utilization of computer resources (mainly RAM), the bloatedness (several GB hard drive space needed) and the host of annoyances and extra “security” measures makes me avoid it as much as possible. Plus, so far I have not seen any application that would not run better on an XP machine than on a Vista one. The only compelling reason is when the computer comes with Vista and there’s no driver support for XP from the manufacturer – which means if you install XP on the computer you might have to manage to use it without sound capabilities.

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