Things I wish I'd known before I installed VS 2005 Service Pack 1

1. Save Time and Space for VS 2005 SP1 by Disabling the Patch Cache (via Heath Stewart) 

The SP1 requires a lot of disk I/O. You can eliminate 1.3 GB of disk I/O, and cut the installation time significantly, by temprorarily disabling the Patch Cache. You can read more about it on Heath's post, but here's the basic idea:

  • Download the patch here.
  • Save the following to a batch file (I called mine InstallVS2005SP1.bat) in the same directory you saved the SP1 install file:
reg export HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer installer.reg
reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer /v MaxPatchCacheSize /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
net stop msiserver
start /wait VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe
reg delete HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer /v MaxPatchCacheSize /f
reg import installer.reg
net stop msiserver
del /q installer.reg 2>nul
  • Run the batch file

I installed SP1 twice (see tip 3), and it ran a lot faster with the Patch Cache disabled.

2. If you don't use C++, uninstall it

I always tend to install VC++ when I install Visual Studio, just in case. Now that VC++ Express is available (and free), I think I'll wait until I actually need to write C++ (hopefully never) to install it.

3. You may have to reinstall it if you upgrade to Vista

I installed SP1 on my XP machine, then upgraded to Vista, and was prompted to reinstall SP1. I'm not sure what was going on, and I'm not willing to roll back to XP, uninstall SP1, upgrade to Vista, and install SP1 again just to make this blog post more complete (sorry!), but if you're planning to upgrade to Vista you may want to do it before installing SP1. On the other hand, with the Patch Cache disabled, the second install was really quick!

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