Installing SQL Server etc.

Warning: this post is only about technical stuff, and not very interesting technical stuff at that. I'll follow up in the next day or two with another post about more interesting data-miney stuff, but this is a post for anyone else running into the same issues that I did, as well as just to provide a complete log of my experiences in doing all of this.

TL;DR install windows updates before installing SQL Server

So: I have a bunch of Windows 7 licenses that I won in a competition that my good friend Jourdan Templeton (omg I totally just name dropped. You know, someone like 2 years younger than me. Damn...) entered me into.
So, because that's what I have, that's my OS. I do have an MSDN license that my work got me, so I could get Windows 8, but then I couldn't use my computer to play games.

Since I'm studying towards my MCSE in Business Intelligence, I pulled open my study guide for exam 462: Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases, and checked what versions of SQL Server it supports.

Express, and possibly Standard. Well that's no good - SQL Server Express doesn't support Analysis Services - I need BI Edition or Enterprise for that. "Well" I figured, "who cares, I'm sure it'll work."
Good news is I was right - although I haven't actually used it for anything yet so I guess I'll see if there are any significant issues that show up.

No, that's not the problem that I ran into - it turns out that my computer had x86 Windows installed on it, but I downloaded x64 SQL Server BI Edition. So, I re installed Windows 7 with x64, and then tried to install SQL Server.

It got about 1/3rd of the way through installing and then came up with this error message:

Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.VC90.ATL,version="9.0.21022.8"

Oh no! What if I just can't install it? So I did some investigation - turns out it's because it was trying to install the Visual C++ redist package. Sure enough, trying to install that manually didn't work.
More googling, nothing much comes up. Lots of suggestions that it was corrupt registry. I tried the registry fixes that were suggested, except that I couldn't find any of the keys that they were talking about - what's going on here?

Eventually I gave up and turned off my computer.

Now, a bunch of these updates failed, so I just kept updating over and over again - there must be some kind of dependency checking that MS doesn't do properly or something. Eventually all updates were installed successfully.

After trying to install SQL Server again, sure enough it installed without complaint. Yay for turning it off and on again a bunch of times...