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Windows Vista SP1 Hands-On Details
babyshiori writes "Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate! The build is the lead-up to the actual service pack, which will be made available to even more testers at a later date. 'In our early tests with the beta, we saw some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds. Microsoft is also touting improvements in "the speed of copying and extracting files," so we tested a few of those scenarios. We noted a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totaling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the aforementioned HP Compaq notebook.'"
http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195414376.jpg taken from http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/yes_virginia_there_is_a_vista_sp1.html
It's been available since late September. .658.
The new version is
"finalized install file itself is expected to be a 50MB download via Windows Update." Microsoft's compression algorithm will be damn impressive if it can compress 7GBs of data in a 50mb download. I think most of the space is used to make copies of critical system files and such, which will probably be deleted when the installation process is over. I would imagine that Microsoft will decrease the space requirement when they release the final version, probably making copies of many unnecessary files since its just a release candidate.
My experience is that copying large files (hundreds of MB or more each) across a network is very slow, copying several hundred JPEG files which are relatively quite small is not a good test. It has been speculated that it is the "baked in" DRM of Vista scanning these files that increases the time. If true, I doubt the DRM would scan JPEG files, as these files are pretty small.
Disable Indexing.. It drove me nuts when I installed it on a "test system" at the office. Between the indexer, and the defragger trying to access the disk when it thinks you don't need it, it seemed to drop the overall speed significantly
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I have a 256MB XP SP2 system, basically stock, in my office. Your definition of "acceptable" and mine are very different. Simply having Firefox and Word open, with a couple windows each, and swapping between the two causes pageouts and enormous delays.
XP is acceptable for basic use with 512MB. Not 256MB, IMHO.
Now Vista, on the other hand, doesn't even seem truly happy in 1GB. I have 1GB and 2GB Vista systems that I use, both with reasonable or better CPU power. The 1GB system is slow and prone to pauses. The 2GB system runs just fine; in 2GB I'm perfectly happy working in Vista, once it finishes its initial indexing operation. The security improvements are nice, and the interface is prettier and more effective than XP's godawful nightmare by a significant margin, but I really don't see enough improvement to justify 4x higher memory requirements. Of course, when 2GB of RAM costs under $150, I guess it doesn't matter that much.
now would you beleive it!
...
6 years ago...
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01-05-001-04-NW-LF-KN
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 16:01:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@transmeta.com
To: Kernel Mailing List linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: And oh, btw..
In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as
being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as
the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided
that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the
same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.
today
http://kernel.org/
The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.35.4 2007-11-17 17:44 UTC F V C Changelog
Invaders must die
I meant to say that XP can actually run by itself, with small apps, on 256mb of RAM. Having either Firefox OR Word running on a 256mb system is pretty awful, seeing as they're both memory-hogging monsters. Having both? Pretty silly. On the other hand, with ~380mb of RAM, it ends up working pretty well. I manage an office full of low-mem systems, and once we got barely past 256mb, stuff started working pretty decently, overall.
I have to say one of the most broken features (from a design POV) is the blocking of start-up programs. Great, so users are secured against programs that might start up without their permission or knowledge. Great, so I can right-click on the tray, scroll to the blocked program, and left-click to start it up.
However - where the Hell is the checkbox to remember my choice?.
Having to do this on every boot is crazy. It was funny that this issue was on the "Windows 7 Wishlist" - it should've been one of the first updates out the door after RTM, and at the latest, SP1.
In case anyone still has nightmares about this, there is a work-around apparently - http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&p=6509411
DRM had nothing to do with it. In order to make sure that non-multimedia I/O and processing didn't overwhelm the I/O and processing needed for content (audio and video), processes and I/O are prioritized. Multimedia runs at the highest priority. From what I remember, Microsoft said that it could only affect gigabit network connections that are running at full speed (basically never on a desktop PC). I think they said they're going to tweak the behavior so it can decide better whether non-multimedia related processes and I/O should be limited. Additionally, there was a bug in the method used to decide how much bandwidth should be allocated to a network connection. The total bandwidth allocated for network connections was equally split across all network adapters even if you had say a gigabit adapter connected and an wireless adapter that wasn't. This caused the issue to show up more often than intended because oftentimes the gigabit connection was getting cut in half without a real reason.
All that said, I think the idea of prioritizing multimedia is fine but there should be a method to turn it off (perhaps a registry setting).
Macs are built around a specific set of hardware, compared to PCs where there are a huge number of possible different components. With Macs, they have been able to write code specific to that hardware so that it stands by very quickly on that set of hardware, but with PCs its very dependant on driver quality. For example, a certain version of the driver for my wireless card would crash the PC if it tried to stand by or hibernate. Now, it only takes a few seconds to standby (and a second to resume) and around 30 seconds to hibernate, although that is mostly a hard drive speed limitation.
I rent game servers, see my homepage for more information
OS X isn't faster because Intel Macs have EFI firmware, it's faster largely because it loads services in parallel.
In early releases, it it displayed a progress bar during system loading, along with the name of the service that was loading. With Tiger (?) the progress bar was just a timer, and it stopped displaying the names of loaded services because there wasn't time, and because things were all loading concurrently. In Leopard, there is no progress bar. It just loads the window server and then it's up.
Microsoft can optimize resource loading and speed up the parsing of the Registry, but its not going to achieve OS X-like speed without major changes to the architecture of Windows. Given the reception to changes in Vista (say, driver model changes), that's going to be difficult to pull off. And "OS loading time" is among the least important of the problems to fix in Windows. Microsoft should start over and force a transition to a good OS before it loses its monopoly position. It's not like the company has loyal users to reply upon.
Ten Myths of Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff!
Sorry, I'm a huge Debian fan (I run Sid on all my systems) but I feel forced to point out that even they do not support releases for 6 years. 6 years ago the current release was Potato, released in August 2000. Neither that, nor Woody released in July 2002, are still supported by Debian. Sarge, released in June 2005, will likely only be supported for another 6 months until April 2008 if the Debian Security FAQ on release lifespan[0] is accurate.
Yes, there are upgrade paths to new versions of Debian, but they also exist from old to new versions of Windows.
[0] http://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
No its one of those "poems" where you just write some prose and toss in line breaks .
The message has nothing directly to do with the "prose". Read just the first word of each line. If you still don't get it, google the "definition of insanity".
My experience is that it Just Works. Everything is set up with a minimum of hassle and prompting, the defaults are sensible, and most of the eye candy has at least some redeeming value. (Like alt-tab shows you a small version of the windows, which is updated in realtime.) UAC is basically SEWindows, and it gets the same treatment as SELinux does (immediately disabled). But it's hard for me to fault Vista for that, since it is pretty much what every security expert was screaming for Microsoft to add.
Plus, Vista actually feels much more like it has a unified UI. I'm sure a MacOS user can tell you that the UI is more than just a window frame and menu bar: it's the "feel" of the whole thing that matters. Well, everything that comes with Vista (with a few aggravating exceptions, which fortunately I've never had to use more than once so far) has that "feel." If you've ever used IE7 on XP, you've probably noticed how utterly weird and confusing it is. Well, in Vista, it makes complete sense. (I still don't use it, of course, but I was tempted.)
I'm not a huge Vista booster or anything. The above makes me sound like I am, but you asked for reasons to use Vista, not reasons not to. But when I have to use the OS -- this computer is mainly a gaming rig -- I like it better than XP. And so long as I don't have to do any serious work, I much prefer it to KDE and GNOME. (For serious work, I need Unix. If I had to make do with screen and Alt+Fn, I would.)
Yes.
And might I say you asked for that one?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Actually, you're not completely off base. SP1 will be refreshing the kernel to bring it up to date with the Server 2008 kernel, which has been in continuous development. See: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_sp1_inside.asp
Is this a service pack, or a fresh install replacing most of the core files?
Both... Vista and Windows Server 2008 share the same core like NT always has with the exception of XP/2003 Server.
So all the work that has been happening at the kernel and even Win32/Win64 level of Windows 2008 Server is also updated and applied to Vista, moving its kernel to be the same as Windows 2008.
So yes there are some basic SP fixes, but most of the fixes were already a part of the Windows 2008 development.
Which means Vista SP1 does replace a large portion of the OS files, updating them to the Windows 2008 server versions, thus making this a large update.
If MS wasn't updating Vista to the Windows 2008 core, there would be no need for a full SP, as all the other changes or updates could be small packages available from Windows Update.
The pro to this is that it gets Vista and Windows 2008 on the same page again as NT was always designed to be. Furture updates and service packs should once again be based off of one fork, thus easing and improving updates for Vista and Windows 2008 at the same time instead of having dual resources on two separate forks like with XP and Windows 2003 Server.
Parent was modded funny, but the 50mb is essentially a glorified downloader. The full download / redistributable pack will run several hundred mb, but should fit on a CD.
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