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First Vista Service Pack Due Second Half of 2007
HuckleCom tipped us to an article on the Dark Reading site, stating that plans are already in the works for the first Windows Vista service pack. The pack is slated for release sometime in late 2007, and will target security improvements and Quality of Life issues that may spring up between January and the pack's release date. Microsoft is already looking for volunteers to help them test it. According to the email sent to Technology Adoption Program members, in order to get in on the ground floor IT shops will have to 'deploy pre-release builds into production environments and report back on the results.' As the article observes, Microsoft may be asking for a lot from their customers. Candidate releases of XP service packs had extremely deleterious effects when initially rolled out. There is no firm word for when in the year this pack will be released.
Excatly my point.
How much could they possibly fix this quick in an OS as monolithic as Vista? not much is my guess. Its more of a combover for people who dont want to get burned like they did with XP when it first released.
Its XP that really made people realize how horribly buggy software could be on release. How many corporate offices wont upgrade software to something untill after a particular period of proven reliabilty on the market now? My guess is quite a bit more since XP.
And how many of those set the requiremnt to be after X number of major upgrades? A Service Pack would qualify to most people as fairly major.
Really 20%?! My Athalon 64 3200+ is using about 3% CPU for the search indexer background process (not usually indexing depending on how I set my power profiles depending on my current needs, I run it when actively using the machine and plugged into a wall outlet) and not much else. Turning off the search indexer has my task manager toggle between 0% and 2% (when taskmgr updates). Are there occasional spikes when the indexer *is* running and fetches a chunck of data, sure, but that's not idleing at 20%, that's a process processing.
XP 64bit was basically that (although they'd shoved things like media player in there).
OTOH the resource monitor *does* take around 20%...
Methinks the people who made the 20% claim forgot to look at what was actually producing it.
Mine goes like:
DWM 2% (that's aeroglass AFAIK)
Task Manager 2% (you can discount that from normal running figures)
Lots of random stuff making it up to between 5% and peaking at 10% (not really a problem.. XP would peak at around the same level).
I'm not fan of vista by any means but CPU usage isn't its problem. *disk* usage... well that's a whole different story - until I switched off windows search the disk light was permanently on (*not* good for a laptop on battery). Still has the occasional burst of reading random files (something in svchost) that I need to track down/kill.
Actually, there's a very simple reason for Microsoft to release a service pack in the second half of 2007. That happens to be the exact same phrase used to describe the release of Longhorn server. In case you didn't know, Longhorn client (Vista) and Longhorn server are built from the same codebase. Vista SP1 is primarily the result of an extra year of development to the common OS components, plus any client patches that didn't make it in time for RTM.
The point is that most of the work will have been done for the server release already. They may as well package up a new build of the client since it will inherit any improvements from the server.
I'm not saying Vista is all that great or anything, but you heard wrong.
(This is running on a 3.4GHz P4, single core, 2GB RAM, nVidia 6600, Aero Glass enabled.)
Breakfast served all day!
When I first tried Vista, it was running in a VM and there were serious problems with the Minesweep implementation, actually: It was difficult to distinguish the zero tiles from unexplored tiles, and there was significant lag. It ran much better when I moved to actual hardware, but you wouldn't think that emulation would cause that big a performance hit for something like that.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Windows XP was released October 2001, XP SP1 in September, 2002. It sounds like Vista SP1 is going to be out faster than XP SP1 was, but not by a large margin.
I love my sig.
Vista went in to RTM in November, so releasing SP1 mid 2007 will leave at 6 to 8 months for bug fixes. Considering how long Vista was in development, and (more importantly) knowing Microsoft, you can assume that there was a lot of polishing that got pushed aside in a rush to just finally get the damn thing out and over with.
Additionally, since Longhorn Server is still under development - and releasing Beta 3 next month or so - there's probably still lots of work being done on the client/server relationship. Changes and bug fixes could be made to the server edition that will require slight changes to clients.
So really it's fairly reasonable to think that there would be at least some changes worth making.
!0.5 is a major OS upgrade, not a service pack. Apple just upgrades and inmproves their OS at a much faster rate, not a hard thing to do when you dont support legacy hardware going back a decade, nor work with a huge range of gear by people who are like the one night wonders of the IT world.
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Except it's nothing new; that's what the TAP programme is. I've been involved with the SQL 2005 TAP, where they supported a live rollout of the beta code for a large project; and throughout we had direct access to parts of the SQL team. TAP doesn't mean the software is thrown at you and you flounder with it, it's a carefully organised rollout and feedback process. We also did the same with BizTalk 2004, and MS ended up flying some of the BizTalk team over to help fix bugs at a customer site (of course the customer was the one who choose to use BizTalk 2004; meh, what can you do?)