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PC World Tests Final Version of Vista SP1
Mac writes "PC World ran the final version of Windows Vista SP1 through a first set of tests last night. Here's the bottom line: 'File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and, in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.'"
"The Windows Vista SP1 install process clears the user-specific data that is used by Windows to optimize performance, which may make the system feel less responsive immediately after install. As the customer uses their SP1 PC, the system will be retrained over the course of a few hours or days and will return to the previous level of responsiveness." source
Any performance tests that haven't taken that into account somehow can't be taken too seriously sadly, it's a difficult thing to deal with for review, much like a fresh Vista original release, though at least SP1 shouldn't blank out your index system's index, and cause that to re-catalog everything too, that really would cripple immediate post-install tests.
Performance Results Mixed with Vista Service Pack 1
Files copied faster in our initial tests, but other performance was slightly slower with the SP1 installed.
Melissa J. Perenson, PC World
Wednesday, February 06, 2008 10:07 PM PST
Microsoft's newly released Service Pack 1 may solve some of the performance glitches that have annoyed Windows Vista users and discouraged others from adopting the OS, but it doesn't appear from our initial tests to be a panacea.
In our first tests of the service pack, file copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.
Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing yesterday, and officially sent out to reviewers today (Service Pack 1 was also unofficially unleashed today on BitTorrent, too). Service Pack 1 will be available to users in March, as a download; Microsoft plans to have SP1 integrated into Windows Vista at retail as well, but could not give a timeline on how quickly the update will be included in the retail version of Vista.
We've already covered many aspects of SP1 in previous looks at the initial SP1 beta last fall, and the more recent SP1 Release Candidate that became available in January. A quick recap: Though many of SP1's benefits lie hidden within the bowels of the OS (such as support for standards like Extensible Firmware Interface and Extended File Allocation Table), SP1 is packed with performance enhancements as well. According to Microsoft, more tangible improvements include improved performance when copying, compressing, and extracting files, improved boot and power down times, improved network performance, and other performance-related fixes.
I took the RTM of Vista Service Pack SP1 down to the PC World Test Center this afternoon and unleashed it across a variety of systems to see how it performed. These tests are preliminary and informal ones; the PC World Test Center is working on additional testing, and we'll post additional information--and update this story--as it comes available.
Service Pack 1: Installation
For my installation and file copy tests, I installed Service Pack 1 on a fairly high-end system: Polywell's $4000 Poly P3503-3DT, a model packed with a 3-GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850 CPU, 4GB of memory, and Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.
The first thing I noticed during the installation process was Windows Vista's friendly warning that the installation might take an hour or more. My experience was, pleasantly, far from that: The installation process required just 27 minutes, less than half of what I experienced with the first beta of SP1 back in September 2007. Your experience may vary greatly, depending upon your system's configuration, though: A Dell Inspiron 1420 notebook (with 2.2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU and 2GB of memory) required just 30 minutes to complete; but two other, less powerful systems took far longer to complete the installation.
SP1 required three reboots in all. During a good portion of the installation time, about 18 minutes, Vista reported it was just preparing the configuration, before actually proceeding with the installation.
File Copy: Performance Notably Improved
I performed a series of tests before and after installing SP1. The first test was a file copy test, identical to the one I performed on the beta last fall. I did three passes, copying 1.9GB of files (562 JPEG images) from a 2GB Kingston SD Card to the PC.
Pre-SP1, the file copy averaged 384 seconds; post-SP1, the copy process showed a noticeable improvement, averaging just 348 seconds to complete the same task. That's a 9 percent improvement, a difference you're likely to notice.
I'm encouraged by that improvement. It's not life-altering when you're talking about just 2GB of data, but if the p
If you need decent file copy time you can always just use Cygwin. I'm not sure why Microsoft can't figure out how to rapidly work in the NTFS that they developed, but open source coders without seeing the NTFS source code seem to always cream Microsoft in speed tests. Heck, they beat Microsoft in recoverability tests as well. Every time I need to recover a Windows box I prefer to use a Linux boot CD instead of trying to do some magic in Microsoft's Recovery Console. So many hard drive failures that won't load in Windows will work just fine mounted in Linux. I guess that is if Recovery Console still works. Did Microsoft fix the 'fix' that disabled it?
Your mileage may vary. I have a P4 2Ghz 1GB RAM machine that runs Vista as fast as it's 2Ghz centrino duo 1GB RAM cousin. Only difference: With Vista I get more eye candy and a shorter startup time.
:)
No, no fat ladies for me
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx
Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over older faster, more stable XP.
Damn, intelligent! Okay...
My experience with XP is building my family's machine and then living on it (I was in high school at the time). I used it for gaming, Visual Studio (C, C++ programmer), homework (Office 2003/2007), and media (Japanesian cartoons on a TV - video cards rock.) I had an Intel 3.4GHz proc with that hyperthreading magic, 1 GB of RAM, and a GeForce 6800.
XP was solid, but I had constant bluescreens when playing videogames. Replacing the videocard mostly fixed this, but my brother still reports it happening every once in a while.
My experience with Vista is building my own PC and buying the latest copy of Windows off of the shelf. Same gaming, an increased Visual Studio usage, less media. (I'm not at home to steal my parents television anymore.) I'm now running the 64-bit version of "Home Premium" on a 2.66GHz dual-core, 2GB of RAM, and an 8800GTX.
The slow file transfers bugged the hell out of me. But, the beta version of SP1 I'm using fixed that to ~XP levels. I haven't done measurements or tests or anything like that, but file copy isn't noticably different than what I'd expect from my family's computer.
Vista's media center used to crash constantly, but there was a stability update that fixed that. I installed some beta nVidia drivers to run Crysis, and those crashed occaisionally. But, the release versions didn't. My computer is on constantly so Outlook can beep at me when I should move, and hasn't bluescreened for months.
I really wonder what people do to their computers. I've used Windows 3.11 (dad's old office machine), 95 (cousin's old gaming rig), 98SE (old family computer), ME (stupid grandparents), XP (current family computer), and Vista (my gaming rig). Never had any crashes or bluescreens, other than when McAfee on the '98 box decided it wanted to rape some VxD drivers, or when Windows 3.11 would run out of memory after being left on too long. XP had crashes related to the video driver, but I suspect the case I chose was baking the videocard alive. My machine doesn't crash.
Now... why would I choose Vista over XP? My biggest reason was DirectX 10 - and the shininess was worth it, IMHO. Could they release it for XP? Probably - I heard the Vista kernel was vastly different than the XP kernel in some important ways, yadda yadda, but they probably could've still done it. But, it is pretty, does run all of my programs (Except Might and Magic 4), and I've been laughing at people who complain about their $399 Dell being slow.
You get what you pay for. Your mileage may vary. My girlfriend's parent's Vista box has been raped by Azureus, Norton (they uninstalled AVG, and then a license of Windows Live OneCare I gave them), Yahoo! install CD add-ons, and overlapping parental controls (Vista AND ISP) that keep even the admin account from sending e-mail or surfing the web.
All I can say is "Don't fuck up your computer." And don't buy one that comes pre-fucked either; it's not really a time-saver. As for your 8GB Xeon... if you don't want it, I'll take it.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Whoa, a lot of people dont get this at all. Here's a hint.
My wife and I recently took over a business that was still using Windows 2000. I had forgotten that a Windows computer could handle email, web-browsing, and QuickBooks just fine on a 6 year old computer with 512MB of RAM.
As Mark said, there were several problems with the XP model. The biggest problem being that large file copy operations could use up all the memory in the system. There were also scenarios where there as double-caching going on.
In Vista RTM, they completely did away with most cached i/o and increased the read/write sizes. This resulted in both a real and a perceived performance penalty for some local copy scenarios, but it dramatically improved network throughput and utilization.
In Vista SP1, they went back to doing *some* cached i/o in certain scenarios. So it's basically a blended approach. They also eliminated the double caching that sometimes took place.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If I read the article correctly, it takes 348 seconds to transfer 1.9GB of data. That amounts to 5.6 MB/sec copyspeed, or about 11.2 MB/s transfer speed on the disk (read + write). A simple, $50 SATA-II disk is able to sustain 50MB/s transfers, read or write, and quality hard disks even more. What is happening with the remaining bandwidth? There is some seek overhead, directory updates, etc but nothing that would slow it down. Also, 11MB/s is hardly a big strain for main memory, cache or PCI bus bandwidth, so it should not affect responsiveness at all. Somebody mentioned lack of rigorous benchmarking because no variance was measured. In this case, it seems many times too slow compared to the physical limit of the disk, so something is fundamentally wrong, irrespective of variance.
I quickly tested this on a SuSE linux machine, and found copy speeds of about 19 MB/sec including syncing to disk (so not tainted by buffering), or 38.2 MB/sec total disk transfer. Accounting for seek overhead, directory updates, etc, that feels like it is limited by the hardware (about 50MB/s for sequential access on this computer). Vista seems to lose about a factor of 4 relative to the hardware. Given the speed of the machine used (cpu, memory, videocard etc) any gui-aspects should not be the limiting factor. All other factors such as different filesystem etc should likewise have a negligable influence. I guess I'll stick to linux for the moment for my IO-intensive work...
That's really just how people have to expect to see disk drives in Windows, there's no technical limitation that prevents you from mounting drives under directories. You can use the Disk Manager control panel applet to configure the drive to mount either as a drive letter, or as a file system attached to a directory on another drive if that's what you want to do. If you come from a UNIX world, it looks strange, but most Windows poeople don't so they carry on working the way they always have.
Sure, as long as you're copying less than around 16384 files...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!