Vista upgrade woes triggered by move to Outlook.com
Yesterday I had to migrate a PC to Vista SP2 just to get IE9 installed just because Microsoft migrated her hotmail account to Outlook.com
So a colleague of my girlfriend asked me to have a look at her portable: she could not send email anymore since Microsoft migrated her hotmail account to Outlook.
Her PC was running Vista Home Premium build 6000 (no service pack).
She was using IE7 (I agree this is a rather old version but read on).
One of my first ideas what that this old IE version would be the reason that her address book seemed not to work when clicking the TO: caption to add addresses to the email that she wanted to send.
According to the FAQ (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/auto-upgrade-outlook-faq) ,
"Outlook.com is good on the following browsers, but some features might not display properly:
So I started by downloading IE9, but that wouldn't install because I needed to be at a certain level of service packs.
The best way to get these service packs, was thru Miscrosoft Update. But alas that didn't fly; Microsoft Update did not pull in any updates. This also seemed to be a known issue with Vista. That also explains why she was still on IE7.
So I downloaded SP1 offline and started the install. The window that popped up told me this could take an hour or more. And it did.
After SP1, Microsoft Update started working again and it pulled in 71 updates. A few reboots and another hour later, it also pulled in SP2.
After that I could install IE9.
And Outlook.com worked again.
This to illustrate the knock-on effects of the migration to Outlook.com