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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.'"
Exciting. Really.
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
will it allow me to do things like run applications and operate a computer now? :)
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
From TFA;
According to Microsoft, typical load times for the final version should range from 30 to 60 minutes. The installation requires 7GB of free hard-drive space (some of which will be reclaimed after the installation isn complete), though the finalized install file itsel is expected to be a 50MB download via Windows Update.
Is this a service pack, or a fresh install replacing most of the core files? Really, should a service pack take that long to install, and require that much space? To put it into context, after a year of use, this XP machine's Window's directory totals somewhere in the region of 3gb.
Looking at my current Vista laptop, I wouldn't be able to install the SP without removing some of my music files first...
Is this a joke?
Don't trust the times this article points out too solidly, they certainly don't sound like they were derived using proper statistics. More likely, they probably just booted it up once before installing the SP, timed it, and then booted it up after, and timed it.
Could be wrong, but whatever, let's party, SP1 is near!
This is really nothing new, Windows 9x, 2k, and XP were all turds when they were first released. Driver maturity, application refinements, hardware improvements, and service packs all make the experience more tolerable.
But I'm sick of the status quo and expected a much better OS when Vista was first released. If it took 9 months of driver development and OS improvements - then it shouldn't have been released 9 months early.
Vista is a not an epic disaster because of:
1. Performance.
2. Security.
3. Anything that early technical adopters care about.
It it is an epic disaster because of:
1. Lack of backward compatibility (software and hardware).
2. Non-technical people being aware of (1).
Therefore, testing whether files copy 2% faster is like exhaustively examining a bolt in a tanker that has run aground and split in half.
Maybe we could even have the ability to write the memory conents to disk before turning the computer off, so when turned on again, it would resume where we've left off. I'd call it "hibernation".
Thanks to all of the issues with Vista, its got a bad reputation. It requires a modern computer, yet most people are happy with what they have, and don't have any reason to migrate to Vista. I am actually extremely satisfied with Vista, but I got Vista Premium from my school, so I didn't pay directly for it. I also have a fairly beefed up computer (3 GB RAM). The problem isn't bugs or boot times, its running times, Vista is just about as fast on 3 GB RAM as when I has 1 GB RAM and was using XP. Now that I've gotten used to it, I like the way Vista does things. But again, people like me don't decide Vista's success, its people who went out and got a $600 computer 5 years ago, and have only known XP. What percentage of people who use a computer today ever used Windows 3.1? Windows 95 through XP are very similar in terms of operation. Vista is a fairly big shift, and getting millions of people who only understand one set of GUIs to change GUIs is an almost impossible task.
Yes, well, one would think so, but it turns out that the ability to extract revenue and spend billions isnt what drives progress or encourages development.
It turns out competition is.
So much for granting monopoly rights to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts'.
I bought a new computer shortly after Vista was released. My old PC had been getting on in years, and when it died I picked up my current laptop to replace it. I was a bit uncertain about using Vista since I had heard so many bad reviews about it, but it came pre-installed so I figured I would give it a go. After a few months of using it, I realised I was right to be worried. At least on my laptop, it was slow as hell, and buggy. It would freeze for no reason, and crash out of programs that XP had run without a hitch. Several of my friends had similar experiences. I considered going back to the store and requesting a tech have a look at it, but having worked in a similar place myself, I figured they wouldn't be able to do anything that I hadn't tried myself (and at the very best, they would send it away to be "looked at" and I would be sans laptop for a few weeks). So instead, I uninstalled the OS, and reinstalled XP SP2. My machine is now flying along and hasn't crashed since.
The desktop that died on me had been running Windows 2000 for over five years, after which I upgraded to XP when I friend offered to give me an install CD he no longer needed. I ran 2k for that long because it met my needs, and was more stable and powerful than the versions of Windows I had used previously (3.11/95/98/ME). The only reason I switched was out of curiosity, and with SP2, XP became the best Windows I had ever used.
I wasn't curious about Vista, but because of circumstances, I ended up trying it anyway. It was an absolutely terrible experience, and I am so glad to be back to my nice, stable XP. So, there's a lesson for Microsoft to learn. They had an opportunity to get a user onboard with their latest OS, but they blew it so badly, that I am now likely to keep on using XP for the next five years, and if I need to switch operating systems then, I am more likely to go with Linux, or buy a Mac.
Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds.
...does it also now display the XP logo at startup?
...the new ToiToi portable toilets fature violas at the bottom of the tank, supposedly to cheer up anyone who happens to fall inside.
The question is, does this make any difference?
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I installed Vista just to test it out to see what was so bad. The first thing that struck me was that the boot times are so long, and my HDD activity LED is blinking constantly. I have a high end PC too*. What really blows my mind is how long it took to develop this POS. A 20 second improvement wouldn't be much of an improvement. With my specs and good programming it should boot IN 20 seconds.
* Core 2 Duo E6750 at 3.2 Ghz, 2 320 GB Segate Baracuda SATA II HDDs, 2 GB of Crucial DDR2 800 at 1xxx Mhz (forgot exacts), P35 Gigabyte DS3, and a Nvidia 8800 GTS.
622677120
Doing the work to install
the fixes to the OS in the
same way as they always have because the one
thing they've never done
over the decades,
and we know it, is to thoroughly check
over an initial release
again and again to make sure that it's good enough
and therefore we are all
expecting that there will be many
different service packs to fix the
results.
40 seconds? I wish. Where did you get that number from? The article talks about how the startup time has been cut down from 1:50 to 1:30. Also, I seem to recall Bill Gates talking a few years ago about how they were going to get the startup time to like 30 seconds or so. Now we're "impressed" when it only takes 3 times that...
This guy's the limit!
Personally I'd much rather they get around to releasing XP SP3.
Vista isn't on my personal radar, nor of my employers. But installing a fresh XP and having to install 80 odd updates is a PITA.
Macbooks can boot into Leopard in about 30 seconds, and we can start our 7 year old Linux boxes at work in less than a minute....how does Microsoft get away with this kind of stuff?
Monstar L
I know it's new and it's got some user interface changes, but for the stuff I do with a computer, is there a reason I should be running Vista, or that I shouldn't uninstall Vista from my next computer and upgrade to the light, fast, relatively DRM-free OS known as Windows XP? So far no one has presented a compelling case for using a OS that runs slower and requires twice the memory of XP. It could be I'm missing something really really super important here. Is it that we're just supposed to run whatever is newest? Because by that logic we should vote for whatever presidential candidate is youngest.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
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.
Being comprised of mostly carbon atoms, if you polish the turd long enough at the right pressure and temperature - it will turn into a diamond.
Superman could do that.
Only I don't think anyone would like shaking hands with him later.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Three Squirrels
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).
MS sometimes releases security roll-ups between service packs or after the final service pack, but they really should do this every quarter if not every month.
A security roll-up should be nothing more than all of the security patches since the last service pack, minus those that have been superceded, recalled, or otherwise outdated, and minus those that are very recent and not yet "proven in the field." In practice, this means everything more than 30-60 days old minus those that had problems or which were later updated.
This would make it a lot easier to rebuild a machine safely:
1. Download the latest service pack and security roll-up.
2. Create a slipstream CD and install it OR install your computer using the original CD and apply the service pack and security roll-up.
3. Lock down your firewall and hope there are no bugs in the firewall.
4. Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
Compare this to the current technique:
1. Download the latest service pack.
2. Create a slipstream CD and install it OR install your computer using the original CD and apply the service pack.
3. Lock down your firewall and hope there are no bugs in the firewall.
Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
4. Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
Compare step 3: The current technique relies a lot more on "hope there are no bugs in the firewall" than if you could easily install a security roll-up before connecting the machine to the network, particularly for the home or small-business user.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm biased. I'm a unix/linux user. Have been since 2002 or so. I gradually developed a hatred of windows when, as a windows 98 customer (not a windows user, I paid for it to brceive a service), I got bored having to reinstall my OS. I used XP briefly for a while especially for games and such. Then i Stopped using it. I became a sole nix user. I had no need to play games because I had little to no free time because of work. Recently I've made the switch to ubuntu and also switched jobs.
This has allowed me some more gaming time. For this reason I bought a nice laptop with a good on board graphics card to play games with. It came with Vista, and that I left on it and dual booted with Ubuntu Gutsy. I bought a few games I'd missed out on in the previous year or two.
I began thinking its been a while since I actually used windows, perhaps I'm judging it harshly. So i decided to try and give a go as my main OS as much as I could. Much of my work is done by logging into other machines via ssh so I thought I might not miss Linux too much and I knew putty was a very good terminal emulator implementation.
So, I tried to install Brothers In Arms: Earned in blood. I Didn't get very far. It just did nothing on clicking the installer. Some searching later shows that this game doesn't work on vista. Apparently the system they used to ensure that you dont lend the CD to your friends or such also ensures that it doesn't work on vista. I had similar problems with one other game I bought.
At this point I was quite happy with Vista aside from that it seemed to have used 12GB of diskspace before i'd even booted it up for the first time. It was shiny and slick. It was fast to boot. I had very little on the local machine itself apart from the games. I'd copied some video files and installed all the games from the Orange Box too.
I played through all of Portal/HL2/HL2E1 and I'd noticed that start up takes around five times longer than it did in the first week. The same performance crap I had experienced with 98. Same shit, different kernel. Aside from that I found that some days the hard disk would begin to thrash _all_ the time. To get rid of them I had to kill system processes and turn of much talked about features.
I was getting annoyed. I felt vindicated. It was also starting to crash, It just does it more elegantly than XP. Steam games had weird start up problems involving minimising and maximising a dozen times.
The internets informed me that Orange Box games work well in wine (which I didn't believe). I've never had a great deal of luck with anything working in wine. But vista was getting beyond a joke and I really thought considering the graphics card I had I should be seeing better game performance. So i thought I'd reinstall my laptop with XP/Gutsy and be done with it. However I couldn't find an XP disk. So I just went with gutsy.
I couldn't believe how flawless Orange Box games went on. Honestly, wine is a serious engineering achievement. Everything works. perfectly.
Goodbye Microsoft, and may our only encounters be the ones in which someone pays me large amounts of money to deal with you.
Hibernation sounds like something you'd attribute to a bear though. When you wake the bear up from his hibernation prematurely he's going to be pissed and maul anyone around him. I prefer a much nicer term like "safe sleep" which brings to my mind visions of a baby sleeping in a crib peacefully under the watchful protective gaze of its parents.
You can throw all of those away - with enhanced DRM in the service pack, you won't be able to play them anyway :^)
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
You'd think that with modern technology and multi-billion dollar budgets they could do it properly.
My Pentium 3 laptop will boot from power on to console (including BIOS) in 18 seconds.
Add another 10 for KDE.
You'll never see Vista booting from power on to fully functional system (not slow and laggy with things still loading) in under 30 seconds.
No need for making ram images or that kind of nonsense.
Thats like applying a bandaid to a amputated arm.
It is infact possible to make a computer boot fast without any tricks.
Should appear shortly. As soon as their systems finish booting.
Have gnu, will travel.
On a Core 2 Duo? Windows Vista usually takes 1 minute 51 seconds to boot, and a little head jiggle, er, 20 second reduction is supposed to make me happy?
Something is seriously wrong here. Perhaps not limited to just Vista in this case, but something is badly wrong if modern computers with all their supercomputing glory take four times as long to boot today than they did 15 years ago.
C'mon guys, get parallel boot dependencies going properly. Yes I'm talking more to the Linux/BSD crowd now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
It's funny the lengths MS is going to in order to hasten Vista adoption. Halo 2 for Windows was released not long ago. That's right, Halo 2. The old game from about 3 years ago that ran on a Pentium 750. Now the PC version is nothing special (as with Halo 1 suitably crippled to make the XBox look good), but it requires, you guessed it, Vista.
Of course there's no reason the game code actually needs Vista to run and in fact there's a patch (in the form of a DLL) that lets you run it under Windows XP but I just find it interesting how desparate MS seems in obsoleting XP.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
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".
Nearly all Windows XP computers are configured incorrectly where every user runs as admin. The only places I see Windows XP configured correctly was at my old lab in college where everyone ran as a normal user and not admin and in certain work places. In addition to that, certain pieces of software require you to be running as admin rather than just a regular user making running as a regular user in windows XP a pain in the ass.
Vista changes that through UAC and the "admin" account not really being admin. That's because there's a conflict of interest: people coming from windows XP expect to be admins and have complete control of their computer but people from the nix world see it as you should never run as admin and if you do only do so for the task needed (sudo). So now the default vista setup puts people into a weird admin mode where everytime you want to do something that actually requires admin rights, UAC pops up. You can actually configure vista closer to the unix style where everyone runs as a normal user and anytime admin privileges are required, they need to type in the admin password. I like this a lot better because now when friends/family ask for computer help I can configure their vista computers closer to a unix model and prevent them from screwing over their system.
Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release
If users of Microsoft Windows rejoice over a stupid service pack, users of Microsoft Vista need to get out more.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
The big question isn't whether or not Vista is acceptably good, it's that it doesn't do a single thing that XP can't. In many cases it does things worse/slower.
So is there a reason to upgrade from XP? I don't see one.
If you hadn't got the Premium version for free would you have paid $400 for it?
No sig today...
My TRS-80 CoCo still boots in about 3/4 of a second. The fact that it still boots at all is an achievement in itself.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I am of the opinion that they really dropped the ball with this Vista thing and even if they fix a lot of the problems in this service pack, it won't really help their position by much. I mean, look, XP did just about everything that businesses needed an operating system to do. If MS had spent the last several years improving XP, ironing out the bugs, perhaps rewriting a few modules that really needed to be re-engineered, fixing security flaws, optimizing the system, getting rid of some bloat or otherwise reducing the footprint of the OS, and just basically making small incremental improvements, and releasing them often, then I really think that XP would be a real winner by now. Just think, if every six months, say, they had released a new service pack for XP, then XP would be at service pack 10 by now. They could have made small transitions, allowing all the other companies in the industry time to catch up, to fix whatever issues might prevent a certain application or another one from running, etc.
But instead, let's take a look at what they did.
They hyped up how amazing the next version would be for an incredibly long amount of time. A database file system; integrated search; an amazing new interface; there were all kinds of innovations that were supposed to get released with Vista. But then reality set in and it was realized that even for a behemoth the likes of MS, it isn't just a simple task of banging out k-locs of code to achieve the kind of incredible product that they were shooting for, and to do it from scratch. If they had simply continued with the XP codebase, adding instant search as a service pack, adding the database file system as another service pack... or better yet, instead of service packs, if they could have modeled these things as modules of some sort that could be installed optionally in a system, then they could release them independently of other features, and an OS release would be unaffected by delays in those other modules. The result of the way they worked was delays, delays, delays, and I really feel that at some point, they took what they had, packaged it up as best they could, called it the final product, and shipped it, just to say that they had something. This is a shame, since all along, they had XP, which, if you clean it up using some utilities you can download for free, and if you uninstall a lot of the bloat, switch to the classic interface, turn off all the animations (or in system preferences, tell it to optimize for best performance, rather than best appearance), well, if you do all those things and make sure that Windows NEVER accesses the Internet except through a firewall (a Linksys box suffices for most purposes), and if you make sure the system doesn't pick up spam, spyware, adware, popups, and all kinds of other crap that attacks Windows (which is achievable by keeping a backup of your system with exactly the configuration you want, and keeping the OS on one partition and your data on another, so that you can simply plop the backup right into the OS partition when something goes haywire), well, if you do all those things, then XP was actually a very good OS. I know, I hate to say it. But yes, it did everything an OS is supposed to do: It booted the computer; it provided facilities to run other programs; and it allowed those programs to use the shared resources of the computer. It also provided many services on top of that that could serve to enhance the computer's usefulness. Now you can argue that it's bloated, that it's slow, that it's prone to security problems, that many many things are wrong with it, and you're right as far as I'm concerned. But the fact is that once an IT department figures out how to get control of this beast, it will do pretty much whatever you want. So I went off on a tangent but the point was that MS already had in XP a perfectly good platform for adding features and even, yes, gaining more control of other markets, which is what they always like to do. They sort of dumped this out the window and went for the next big thing.
In any industry other than consumer software, Microsoft would have been shut down years ago for negligently exposing consumers to grossly defective products. Vista is the Aqua Beads of software. You wouldn't tolerate this level of nonsense in your automobile, your television, or your kids' breakfast cereal; why tolerate it in a commercial product that has huge economic and public-policy exposure?