Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
After installing Vista SP1, it has been determined that the Vista SP2 will be a Vista uninstaller with a full version of XP Professional.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
So how come it rates the front page?
Microsoft Windows 7
GNAA *just kidding*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... the sky is typically blue, the grass is mostly green, and the Pope is Catholic.
I un-installed Vista about 6 months ago and returned to XP. The main reason is because I simply didn't think that the main issues I had with it (some outlined in this article) really could be fixed... at least not with a service pack release or other patches. It seemed to me that the focus with Vista simply had shifted more to the shiny eye candy for end users, and that when you focus on the pretty stuff the necessary stuff will logically be less efficient.
I do have some reasonable high hopes for this new MinWin, but until then, I'll just continue to expect more tests and benchmarks like this one.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
"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.
Besides, unless the huge copy time problem has been fixed people will not be happy. Going from 15 minutes to 13.5 minutes is not going to make MS any friends.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I for one am waiting until SP1SP1 comes out. I'm no early adopter.
I'd love to see em get Vista in proper order, but damn it... All this wasted effort is damn funny... Slopping more junk isn't the answer... Maybe one of these service packs should start stripping away all the excess code. I mean c'mon, 27 minutes to install a collection of bug fixes? 3 reboots? Jesus... and that was on quad 6600. Ouch.
It should also be noted however he was testing the file transfer with a SD card, I would assume they behave similar to your standard USB flash drive and is generally either optimized for speedily transferring large files, or small files but rarely both...
One would think copying a Blue-Ray disc image across 2 hard drives would be more appropriate? Or at least using a standardized mix set of data, both files large and small. Word documents, mp3 files, disc images... But wait this is PC World... Not exactly at the forefront of reliable and unbiased testing...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
TFA says file copying on a test machine showed a 9% decrease (384 secs. to 348 secs.) in the amount of time to copy "1.9GB of files (562 JPEG images) from a 2GB Kingston SD Card to the PC." Yet, further down in article, the author performed "informal" file compression tests on two other machines and found poorer performance when compared to pre-SP1 results.
As someone who uses Vista at work, I for one welcome our slightly faster copy-and-paste overlords.
The mystery customers will be the RIAA and MPIAA. There were these bugs in the DRM code you see...
In case anybody is interest *why* Vista pre-SP1 seemed so much slower copying files than XP, and why post-SP1 for the most part fixes it, you should check out Mark Russinovich's blog post on the matter.
It's a very interesting read.
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?
Hm. That's funny... my personal tests conclude that my performance is better without Vista than with it.
Running Vista is a lot like trying to run a foot race in a swimming pool while wearing balls-and-chains on your feet. And then when you get to the end, a big fat lady grabs you out of the water and sits on your chest.
See, if you had just a little bit more beefy hardware, you'd barely even feel the chains.
Oh shoot it wasn't a car analogy.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
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.
I've wondered for a while how many of the Vista sales were similar to the Xbox 360 method of pushing product out the doors at MS to retails/3rd parties and counting that as units installed. I think this could be a good chance to see if that's the case, if we still see pre SP1 Vista boxes this summer I guess I'll have my answer.
His single file copy test was a bunch of files from a flash drive. He copied them three times before SP1, and three times after. He then reports average times, but no reporting of variation. That's not exactly serious benchmarking now is it.
To be fair to PC World they do say that this is informal and preliminary and they will publish comprehensive results in due course. My criticism is that this makes front page of Slashdot (the reason of course is that it's somewhat critical of Vista and therefore of course is great news here in anti-MS FUD world).
It astonished me that stories about Mark Russinovich's blog post on Vista file copying (including changes implemented for SP1 after customer feedback) were rejected.
It strikes me as feeble that the Slashdot crowd all scream FUD! whenever MS are guilty of it (frequently), but then commit the same sin themselves in the other direction.
And the other thing that hacks me off is that this post will no doubt be modded flamebait or troll which means worse karma (got none anyhow) and therefore no voice. It's an interesting effect of the Slashdot moderation scheme that any criticism of Slashdot is suppressed. Free speech doesn't flourish here (unless you follow the herd!)
I've been running the SP1 Release Candidate for a while now and it has improved networking greatly (resuming from Sleep the network is available again immediately unlike pre SP1 where there was quite a lag), and on that front the network discovery and usage of my LAN is better than XP. (Machines are found more reliably and it all just works much more smoothly).
My biggest gripe with Vista has been the DVD Maker. I look upon OSX users with envy because of their iLife. I don't have HUGE needs for my digital media, but I would like to be able to throw one or more videos onto a DVD with a nice menu. I used to be able to do this without effort with Nero, but the version I have was an OEM that doesn't work with Vista.
So, I turned to what Vista has, and was thrilled to see DVD Maker, a simple program that seemed to do pretty much what I wanted and made really, really pretty menus with no hassle.
EXCEPT IT DOESN'T WORK.
I haven't had one successful DVD made using this dang thing.
I have tried burning DVDs with video taken straight from digital free to air tv (so already in DVD resolution and MPEG2 encoded), I've tried Divx files, I've tried everything. While you're creating the DVD in DVD Maker it shows EVERYTHING perfectly. If it burned the disc the way it SHOWED it in the program it'd all be fine... except what does it do?
One of two things:
* Fail with cryptic error at 99% of burn process (except it actually hasn't even touched the blank DVD)
OR
* Burn the disc successfully, but turn all widescreen material into squished 4:3 content... leaving only beautiful 16:9 menus working correctly.
It's utterly infuriating and is the only thing that has made me want a Mac really... just iLife... if I could have that on Windows I'd be happy.
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
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista machine (a Quad core Xeon w/8 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium 4 running XP SP2, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Internet Explorer 7 will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various "Vista ready" machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than its XP counterpart, despite Vista's re-written core code. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3.2ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim Vista is a superior OS.
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.
It's been done.
If you ask me, Microsoft should provide guidance on stripping stuff out of all its OSes to value-added resellers and to corporate accounts who need them. The same guidance should be available to the geek/hobbiest public on an "as is, unsupported" basis so people could play around. Such guidance should include how to install security patches to stripped systems.
Even better if they provided a toolkit to selectively add or remove components like networking, printing, web browsing, or what-not that are are part of a "core user OS" but not part of the very heart of Windows.
"XYZ Appliance based on Microsoft Windows Vista" or "XYZ Appliance based on Microsoft Windows XP" would make a great VM environment and in some situations, a great hardware appliance.
"davidwr's custom-stripped XP" might make a good core for my next project.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In Borgian Redmond, copies paste YOU! *groan*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why on earth did he not try copying from hard disk to hard disk, from network, large files and on the same disk? 9% improvement from a dog slow start isnt anything to chear about either. Since its still significantly slower than XP it sucks. Some reference points would also be very nice. If Vista is 70% slower than XP 9% is not much of an improvement.
Why not testing some common applications and see how they behaive. Its not uncommon that speedups in one place makes for regressions in others, especially with spaghetti code.
Its a pretty abysmal benchmark considering the source.
HTTP/1.1 400
Microsoft Windows is Dying
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
We tried running Vista and it was, on average, twice as slow as XP, so we just gave up and won't install it on any boxen in our labs.
We have real work to do and shelling out cash for graphics cards we don't need for an OS that runs even slower is a total waste of time.
Most of our boxen are now Linux-only or Linux/XP dual boot now - performance matters, and making it only 45 percent slower than XP when it was 50 percent slower won't cut it in a production environment.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why bother with Cygwin when you can get that environment without all the Microsoft crap?
Another benchmark. Man those network speeds are scarily bad compared to XP. Glad I never made the switch...
http://gizmodo.com/337768/battlemodo-windows-vista-service-pack-1-rc1-vs-shipping-vista
Question -
Response -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624
No thanks, I'll just skip the paying $400 for Vista Ultimate part.
My blog
Why bother with computers when you can just go outside?
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
Now, more than ever, I am glad that Microsoft is getting rid of that grubby XP.
Wait! DAMMIT! Fscking mirror universe!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
How is this possible?
The best sales pitch for SP1 is that it COPIES FILES FASTER? Which is still probably slower than it was with XP, thus making it a non-improvement?
Ridiculous.
Was when I was talking to friend who is a Microsoft employee about considering Vista for the home network I'll be installing when I shift this month. He shook his head in a fiercely negative fashion while his mouth carefully said "I can't make any comment at all on that subject."
Given that they're one of the companies that demand their marketing people describe themselves as "Evangelists" that was a scary indication of a breakdown in religious fervour for the faithful.
The outside has all those bugs, not to mention all that glare from the sun detracting from your enjoyment. It's just easier to stay inside and venture outside in a virtual world where you can kill the bugs with huge fireballs and fancy weapons. If I go out in the real outside with fancy weapons or fireballs, I'll get sent to an indoors where I can't use my computer to go to these cooler virtual worlds.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I have an XP machine available at work (that I thankfully don't have to use constantly, as I have a Linux workstation). But file copying is a problem on XP, too: it's slow! Frankly, on my Linux workstation I'm regularly dealing with files over NFS that create, delete, rename, or symlink instantaneously, so how Windows can take several seconds to do these things on its *local* hard drive is beyond me. My Mac at home works fine too.
In theory, the slow-down is caused by anti-virus, backup or other random stuff that IT might have on the PC. But really, I don't care: I blame Microsoft anyway, because the extra crap interfering with basic file activities wouldn't even *be* there if the OS didn't need it all to remain even reasonably secure and reliable.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Or is WinFS not included in SP1?
Four words, your mileage may vary, were never so true. I run a network at a tech company and we have a nice distribution of windows xp, mac, and vista computers. The XP machines are, on the whole, pretty happy little machines. Very consistent performance. The Vista machines, however, are all different. There's only one on the whole network that works just fine and rarely has problems. The rest of them all seem to have different troubles.
Really, can we stop the flamewars and the discussions and just all of us agree that Vista sucks differently on different systems? I've grown so tired of these posts on Slashdot where one person is having a horrible Vista experience and someone else claims theirs just works great and they have no complaints. Also, "it's probably something about the way you have it set up" isn't a particularly comforting answer when an operating system really should come set up properly. As in, the defaults it installs with should be the ones that will work pretty well for most people. It seems to me there's only about one in every four or so people who's completely content. The rest of us are struggling and frustrated.
The "journalist" made these awesome discoveries that there were minor differences in single trial file copying speeds of a memory card of all things. And further testing on unzipping files because that's such a core OS function.
The author didn't bother testing SMB1 vs. SMB2 copy speeds or even acknowledging that she understood there was a difference in these technologies.
I was going to make a joke about someone in my family being able to write a more authoritative article, but then I realised it wouldn't be a joke. Even my parents Jack Russel Terrier knows more about the real issues with Vista than this hack.
Can we get slashdot submitters to consider only submitting articles involving real journalism instead of a quick "Oh this looks like an anti-MS article!" kneejerk?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
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...
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Wow man and that earth shattering file copy speed was on a 3GHz dual core machine - 1000 machine cycles for each byte transferred. Does MS realize that modern tape drives have a MINIMUM speed of 32MB/s? LTO-3 tapes don't go any slower. So will MS be selling paper tape backup systems or do we need punch cards? Just thinking of what they must be doing wrong to make Vista this slow, makes my head hurt.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Umm, you do realise we're discussing Vista here, don't you?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Doesn't it just seem *bizarre* that to this day we see filesystems in microsoft tied to rather archaic looking drive letters? Looking at his various traces and everything having an arbitrary letter to identify what filesystem it originates just seems kinda lame.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That's fifteen hours in a week! In numerical computing it would very nice to get such huge speedups on long running jobs - 9% improvement is a huge amount. In desktop computing that process of copying say a 42GB file would also be noticably less painfull with a 9% speedup.
> It's easy to think of half a second as being "instant" until you've
> experienced the "Do you really want to delete this?"
It's very easy to disable...
No sig today...
http://talkback.zdnet.com/5206-10533-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=44087
He killed his laptop and couldn't use his desktop for a couple of hours.
Put identity in the browser.
Microsoft scooped up his company not long after he exposed the Sony rootkit. Funny coincidence.
we will end no whine before its time
I think I'll be taking a hit for admitting I use Vista but anyone who runs a HTPC understands the WAF, and she just likes MCE better than the rest. This machine has been running 2005 MCE forever so when Vista came out I picked up a copy of premium to play with and threw it on there.
It was running on there very well (not doing much other than playing xvids). It hsd some issues, like I couldn't seem to get any sort of DTS out of the spdif, wouldn't keep my speaker setup (just trying to set it as 5.1, always resets to stereo).
I waited patiently for SP1 and jumped at installing it when MS sent me the link.
Oh what a mistake, it completely killed the machine... I had to reinstall the video driver, audio driver, VFD driver... Then at least it seemed worked find. Would NOT connect to my WPA2 WAP, and Vista MCE would not start.
I am sure I have to take some of the blame for this, I had hacked the termsrv.dll so I could have two simultaneous logins (the limited TV login on the TV, and my Admin login via RDP)... and who knows what extensions I had installed into MCE to play with. Plus I had Win DVD and the Klite codec pack installed.
Of course being your normal techy who works in a support role, you get mildly excited when something huge goes wrong, and worked for an entire day attempting the normal stuff to try and back this out. Hoping I could allow the family some normal evening TV time. Nothing I did worked, it felt like a cascading failure, the more I tried to fix it, the worst it got.
Finally defeated, I resigned myself to just reinstall Vista, it's a fairly simplistic install and figured it would only take a hour or two to get reinstalled. But then Vista began to bluescreen during the install, sometime after formatting the discs.
So I threw Ubuntu on there and checked everything out to make sure all the hardware was functioning perfectly. Works great, but I could not get Vista back on the machine.
Now the PC is back running MCE2005 happily and I think I'm going to take a shot at putting Linux on the beast again (I tried Gentoo before but couldn't get the digital audio working properly over the spdif, I think this time I'll try a prepackaged HTPC distro).
The phrase "you can't polish a turd" springs to mind here!
For example, my SanDisk USB drive completes copying immediately XP says it's finished, my PNY branded USB drive takes a second or two to finish and my cheap unbranded USB drive can take anything up to 20 or 30 seconds to complete. In each case, I watch when the LED stops flashing on all the drives and I guess it's something to do with the quality of the circuitry in each one.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
As much as I like Cygwin (I use it daily and install it on every machine I touch), it's pretty slow. If you want a fast and robust copy, use Robocopy.exe, a command line tool you can download from Microsoft (or various other sites). It will copy across samba shares, retry failed copies, resume interrupted copies, mirror entire trees, keep NTFS permissions (or clean them), do CRC checks, exclude arbitrary files or directories, etc... I use it for anything that involves more than a few files or for backup. The only things missing are ssh and regex (use cygwin's rsync for that).
Non-Linux Penguins ?