I'm wondering what people think I should do. I've grown tired of Vista, but I still want to be able to access MS Money, maybe uTorrent and some games. I have my Vista partition backed up (and restored now), and basically over-wrote it with Gentoo, which I have almost everything working on now, though I have a couple more things to work out now that I've hopefully got it all sorted out (I've installed Gentoo fully twice with tons of problems). What I'm wonder though is should I go through the hassle of completely reinstalling Vista, after finding a way to integrate SP1 onto my disk, or should I just reinstall the Vista bootloader since I have my previous install restored to a partition and everything supposedly working as before. I say supposedly as I haven't booted back into Vista yet. I don't really care about GRUB as that is a simple fix, but would the pain of reinstalling and reconfiguring everything be worth it to reinstall Vista.

Personally I like a clean install Mark. Especially when it comes to a service pack, I think an intergrated installation is more stable. I usually do it over a period of a week or two to get all my settings and programs the way I like them. Because I run dual boots of the OS's I use it doesn't really interrupt my daily usuage that way, so I can carry on using the one while I reinstall the other.

It would be very interesting to know your SP1 slipstream method

Grav!ty wrote:

Personally I like a clean install Mark. Especially when it comes to a service pack, I think an intergrated installation is more stable. I usually do it over a period of a week or two to get all my settings and programs the way I like them. Because I run dual boots of the OS's I use it doesn't really interrupt my daily usuage that way, so I can carry on using the one while I reinstall the other. It would be very interesting to know your SP1 slipstream method

I may see if I can get a disk from my mom with SP1 already integrated as she has an MSDN subscription through work and gets all the install disks as well, so presumably there is a Vista SP1 install disk as well. The only reason I'm hesitant to redo everything is that I'm probably not going to use it all that often (once a week-ish) unless I find I can't do something in Gentoo, which looks less and less likely. If I could get MS Money working, I'd be set, but that probably won't happen. That and I really hate redo-ing all the settings, though it usually isn't too bad. I know what you mean as far as stability and such with service packs, although I never had any issues with stability on Vista, unless I was playing a game

Well you definitely could do either one,
I'm like graham though, and prefer a clean install

I finally got around to this today (sort of) and I just reinstalled the bootloader. Needless to say, things are a lot slower on Windows compared to my Gentoo install. There is some stuff that is "better" but overall, I'll probably just get GRUB fixed up and reboot back to linux then at some point.