Today, I was given an older Dell Laptop to reinstall Windows XP. Used the recovery discs that they provide and 30 minutes later, the laptop is up and running, almost. I had to service pack it and since Microsoft recently released service pack 3, I figured I will download that and patch the whole thing all at once, or so I thought. Turns out, the version of XP I had is pre-service pack 1 and I got the following error:
“Setup has detected that the version of Service Pack installed on your system is lower than what is necessary to apply this hotfix.
At minimum, you must have Service Pack 1 installed.”
People who know me can attest that I’m not one to partake in bashing Microsoft but this is ridicules and kind of a microcosm of what they are doing wrong in Redmond. You would think that with all the billions of dollars and resources at their disposal, they could write a service pack that could be applied to any version of Windows. Guess not! At least this isn’t the frustration that I felt when I first installed SP2 back in the day. Now, I gotta find my “good” SP2 disc that I thought I didn’t need anymore.
i have the same error message. My problem though is that i don’t have any service pack on disk. where am i going to find service pack 1 or 2 for download anywhere?!
You can download service pack 2 here.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displaylang=en
Good Luck!