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Vista SP1 Coming In Q1 2008
Many readers sent in word of Microsoft's announcement of the schedule for Vista SP1. The Beskerming blog has a good summary. Up to 15,000 people will get access to a beta of SP1 by the end of September; general release is targeted (not promised in stone) for early 2008. The service pack is said to improve performance and stability, not to add features.
It's pretty clear now that Vista should not have even been released until Q1 of 2008.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Dammit, screw Vista, where's my SP3 for Windows XP?
If the intention is to fix everything that's wrong with Vista, I'm impressed they got it all into only 1 GB.
Service Pack 1 won't exactly make Vista more desirable as an OS; but it is a psychological landmark that says "we worked most of the bugs out and we're finally done with it". Businesses may bite; but I'm not 100% convinced that Vista is better than XP quite yet.
This SP full of patches still probably won't prevent people from deleting their Recycle Bin, end the UAC nazi tyranny and let admins do admin things with computers. Once MS figures-out a way to make Vista useful without all those annoyances and brick walls, then I may give it another look.
I know I'm going to -1 Flamebait hell for this; but if a Windows box has to be insecure in order to be useful, then so be it.
The game.
vista really chews the memory up, I hope they fix that first off..
:-p
:-p) USB memory stick and have Vista manage it as extra RAM. It's not really RAM-fast or anything (but it doesn't seem to make things worse at least), but especially seeemed to cut a bit on hard drive access. I'm not sure, but it's possible it relocates some of its swap file to it as ReadyBoost kicks in.
Here's my unofficial mini-service pack for Vista.
1. Type services.msc in the start menu search box and go there.
2. Open and set "Windows Search" to "Inactive" as its start mode and stop the service, unless you use Vista's search facilities and not a third party tool like Total Commander or Directory Opus, etc.
3. Open and disable "Superfetch" in the same way, unless you trust it to actually make things run faster and predict your usage behavior. Keep in mind that it'll keep caching data to RAM in its "prediction" process. Even data files, not just executables and DLL's. This can be especially nasty when it starts caching 100 MB-sized files you have downloaded with P2P apps because it think you'll run them soon, or something.
4. Try putting in a ReadyBoost-compatible (you probably won't know if it is until you've tried
5. If you haven't got these installed (you'll notice if it tells you they can't be installed on your OS), download and install these Vista hotfixes performance and reliability and compatibility and reliability. Among other things included is fixes to the Vista memory manager and many users have reported both cut memory usage directly after boot up, and better 3D benchmark scores. It also fixes the infamous "slow file copy" bug of Vista.
Now try use it for a day or so, and hopefully your hard drive access has been cut. As long as you don't use the Vista desktop search, no disabled services above really impact the ability of Vista to function as normal, and you can always enable them again if you notice no improvement. Something else that access your drive a lot at a few times is the System Restore feature that also runs as a service, but I don't recommend disabling that one since it'll also disable your ability to restore your OS state to an earlier date if, say, an application or driver install would go horribly wrong.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
To which the developers at Skype are yelling "HOPEFULLY NOT ALL AT THE EXACT SAME TIME, ASSHATS!"
An interesting nugget of info for you all, seeing as no-one has mentioned this yet....
The update will bring the Vista kernel to version 6.1. Why is this significant? It's the same kernel version that Windows Server 2008 will be. That means folks, that Microsoft, in effect have used Vista pre-SP1 as a test-bed for their Windows server platform. Servers crashing cause more panic than workstations, and take a guess slashdotters....which market-share are Microsoft champing at the bit for most? I'll give you a clue.....they already own the desktop.
The Vista strategy was "release and fix while in production" and in fairness, 6 months down the line, a lot has been fixed and Vista is shaping up to be a solid platform, but build numbers don't lie.
There, I said it.
throw new NoSignatureException();