SP1 RTM Not Served to Custom Windows 7 Installations Through WU

Users that leveraged third-party software to customize their Windows 7 installations should not be expecting Service Pack 1 to be served to them via Automatic Updates.

In fact, not even when they’ll do a check for refreshes available on Windows Update will customers come across Windows 7 SP1 RTM.

One example of customization software that users turn to in order to tweak Windows 7 is vLite. According to the Redmond company, Windows 7 installations customized with vLite are directly impacted by the problems described above.

“vLite is known to remove some Windows system components. If you know for a fact that you used vLite to customize your installation of Windows 7, you should not expect Windows Update to offer you the option to install Windows 7 SP1,” the software giant said.

One way to work around the changes introduced by vLite is to get Windows 7 SP1 from the Download Center and install it manually.

At least in theory, a manual deployment of Windows 7 SP1 RTM should work. However, provided on just extensive the modifications to Windows 7 are, the upgrade might fail installing.

In this context, the operating system will produce the following error message: “Service Pack installation cannot continue. One or more system components that the service pack requires are missing.”

“This problem is commonly caused by using third-party products to customize a Windows 7 installation and remove some system components,” Microsoft explained.

The advice from the Redmond company is to remove the custom Windows 7 altogether, install the operating system again, and only then attempt to upgrade to Service Pack 1.

Of course, customers that will use vLite or other similar solutions to customize Windows 7 SP1 are bound to run into problems when they’ll attempt to download and install Service Pack 2.

Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM Build 7601.17514.101119-1850 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM are available for download here.

Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download here.