Slashdot Mirror
Vista SP1 Guides for IT Professionals Released
wilkinism writes "Microsoft released several detailed documents explaining just about everything you ever wanted to know about Vista SP1. Highlights include a Deployment Guide, list of included hotfixes, and a 17-page list of 'Notable Changes'. In reviewing the Notable Changes document, it seems the company focused on improving reliability & performance in really specific scenarios, so it's no wonder that most reviewers are reporting no noticeable gains."
I don't think those two (from a quick glance at the doc) are very uncommon...
The first page of the instructions say: Uninstall Vista, install something else.
You can't handle the truth.
It did fix a few issues for me, most notably being the widely-reported file copy speed problem. After installing the RC my drive-to-drive speed went from 20MB/s back up to XP levels. That was one of my top-five gripes about Vista.
This will bring your disk access speeds close to XP with or without sp1. SP1 from what I read mainly effects lan speeds.
With all these things going on the disk access will slow down considerable and no service pack will fix it. Most users dont care and just want their system to work so this is why its enabled by VISTA by default.
http://saveie6.com/
Bucking the slant around here, I bought Vista the very same day that SP1 RC1 became available exactly because of that. In a short while SP1 will be final and Vista will get incrementally better. It's been a pleasant experience for me so far, all of my software works but about 1 in 15 needs to have XP compatibility checked. UAC doesn't annoy me very often as well - maybe that's because I don't go into OS configuration screens or run XP ticked programs all that often. Now, with all that said: the day Linux runs all my games and all games are released for Linux is the day I say: "Vista? Yeah I used to use that.". Linux has everything but entertainment and for me entertainment is the primary use of my computer.
Shh.
... "Please protect your Windows investment! Don't use Microsoft products to access the Internet. Instead, go here to request a free (as in beer) CD with the latest anti-spam and anti-virus software. When your CD arrives, just place it in your CD-ROM, and reboot your computer before going on-line. You will then be able to surf the web in full comfort knowing that no viruses, spyware or spam will take over your machine. When you are ready to return to the full Genuine Windows Vista experience for running your favorite games, such as BSOD, simply reboot your machine and take the CD out of the CD-ROM before the reboot starts."
In my opinion, here are the fixes and improvements ones that the general Windows population might actually care about:
Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
Improves power consumption when the display is not changing by allowing the processor to remain in its sleep state which consumes less energy.
Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files underneath.
Improves performance over Windows Vista's current performance across the following scenarios1:
25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
Improves responsiveness when doing many kinds of file or media manipulations. For example, with Windows Vista today, copying files after deleting a different set of files can make the copy operation take longer than needed. In SP1, the file copy time is the same as if no files were initially deleted.
Improves the time to read large images by approximately 50%.
Improves IE performance on certain Jscript intensive websites, bringing performance in line with previous IE releases.
Allows users and administrators using Network Diagnostics to solve the most common file sharing problems, not just network connection problems.
SP1 includes a number of changes which allow computer manufacturers and consumers to select a default desktop search program similar to the way they currently select defaults for third-party web browsers and media players. That means that in addition to the numerous ways a user could access a third party search solution in Windows Vista, they can now get to their preferred search results from additional entry points in the Start Menu and Explorer Windows in Windows Vista with SP1. 3rd party software vendors simply need to register their search application using the newly provided protocol in Windows Vista SP1 to enable these options for their customers.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Look, here's what the intelligent people want from you, and the others who are posting to rip on Vista. Shut the fuck up. We know you don't like Vista, and you've had an entire fucking year to make that plain to everyone. Now, when a Vista story comes along, just shut up so that we can have some sort of sensible, intelligent discussion about the topic.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Having an older system really shouldn't affect the stability of the system. Perhaps some of your RAM is dying. You should run a memory test. Apart from that, it may be some buggy drivers, but it probably has nothing to do with the Athlon 2000+. I have a Celeron 1.5 with 512 MB of RAM. Vista is extremely stable. Although it's unbelievably slow. Which is why I run Mandriva. Of course, the wife refuses to use Linux, Although all she does (web, watch videos, msn) can be done just fine on Linux.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've been using vista almost for a year now. At first, I was quite happy about it, it is supposed to have exiting new features like IO priority, readyboost, superfetch and all that. And I liked Aero at first. And better security (I must say, I like UAC, it's really no greater pain than sudo).
/dev/sdb1 /dev/sda1". Yup. Vista no more (well, it is saved as an image on external drive, just in case).
.Net programming and I've set up a vmware XP box for development and virtualized XP is waaayyy faster than vista ever was.
But it's SLOW. And while I could live with that, I just couldn't stand it hijacking my desktop. How many times did the system start doing some heavy disk IO, without ANY option to stop it. Even task manager didn't respond so I could check what was going on.
As time passed, I upgraded from a 3 year old laptop to a new one (Acer 5920G, a fine machine I must say). The only problem is, Vista is not any faster than on a 3 year old system!? Wtf??
So, the other day I was doing some linux stuff and installed Ubuntu to an external USB disk.
OH MY GOD (spoken in that-lady's-voice-from-friends-series).
It's fast. It's nice. And it's fast. And it uses only so little of my 2 gb ram. And did I tell you it was fast? Oh, and file copy is a snap!
So I've been using it for a week or so and I love it. But then... yesterday I came across this "compiz fussion" thing.
OH MY FSCUKING GOD THAT'S AWESOME!
So guess what. About an hour ago I've "cp -a
I do a lot of
Since SP1 doesn't solve any performance issues, I probably won't use that beast ever again. When I have to use Windows, I'll use XP.
So... Is Linux winning the desktop in 2008?
Totally!
"Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to make sure." ?
Yeah, I would say "it does not work" is a fairly significant issue for most people. They don't care why all this software won't work including Novell Client, Brio Intelligence Explorer, SecondLife Client, Crystal Reports, Microsoft SQL Server (both 2005 and 2007) and the myriad apps that require that. They don't care why all this hardware won't work including VIA KT400 chipset with radeon graphics controller, many popular tv tuner cards and nearly all Adaptec RAID controllers.
What they care about is that it is their computer and they want it to do stuff that Vista won't do. There are enough problems that they're not corner cases - they are the main stream. For goodness sake how does Microsoft make an OS incompatible with any flavor of Intel NIC? Who doesn't save files from a share to a pendrive, or upload pictures from their camera? Don't you think a normal person would want that to happen in under a month? iTunes? It won't work with iTunes? You don't think people are going to consider that a deliberate failure? Or a fatal flaw?
That's it. "It won't do what I must have my computer do" is the dealbreaker for everybody I've seen use it so far.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Vista's memory tester is basic of the basic type memory tester. You can't really compare it to memtest86. One hint would be that Vista's memory tester runs a few magnitudes faster than memtest86.
You can boot memtest86 from USB stick.
...well, the release candidate anyway. It does fix some issues, but Vista just doesn't feel stable. Period. It is very hard for us to make the business case for vista because it doesn't seem to hold up well under load. What do I mean? Well, things like Mega-Tasking with lots of apps open, lots of I/O, lots of network activity.. it craps out in strange ways.
We've been using vista 64 business for over a year (because if we didn't use it on our work desktops we wouldn't properly test it..eating your own dogfood..and all that) and in no short order we have experienced all sorts of fun issues. Just off the top of my head:
*unstable video drivers (crashes, black screens, etc. SP1 makes this worse)
*slow file i/o
*explorer is unresponsive (its just like on windows 98 when some program in the co-operative multitasking would flake out and take the system with it.. except command prompt windows continue to run just fine)
*the tiff viewer that comes with vista is broken. the solution from ms? use the office 2007 document viewer. Nevermind the "new improved" built-in fax stuff on vista.
*backup with vista has never worked (maybe in sp1 its ok?)
*attempting to uninstall sp1 rc1 resulted in bluescreening (whee)
*users that want to change the font or size run into Serious Issues with minor changes.. text cutoffs etc
*random window placement/size issues on multiple monitors
*people that like to use the keyboard in the default save/save as dialogue cause all sorts of weird issues if they hit arrow keys. google this one... its weird
*explorer isn't smart about huge files and generating previews.. big images cause explorer to hang which seems like the whole system
*have I mentioned horrible performance?
SP1 Vista Driver Crash and Slow File Copy Whee.
At one point forums.nvidia.com had 110+ pages of people having driver issues in one thread. I can attest that things have not improved to xp-levels of stability in the past year.
I really, really hope Linux continues growing exponentially. Good windows app support on linux would be golden. I am super impressed by wine at this point.... so tempting.