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Vista Service Pack 1 Is Out
superglaze writes "What's to say? After much prevaricating and slipping out then pulling back, the first service pack for Windows Vista has actually been released. It's available for download now via Microsoft's sites, with an auto-update rollout scheduled for next month, and it should hit Amazon's virtual shelves on Wednesday."
Huh? Yawn...
Have there been any good reviews of SP1?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
Well, enuff said.
. . . and now he's mad.
Um. Seriously. I'm glad there's a service pack out. But I'm going to wait a few weeks and see if it causes USB drives to melt, or sends your life history to the Ministry of Total Information Awareness.
I have a very bad feeling about this.
...its a toss up.
OR
I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
A day? A week? Two?
Keeping in mind my only reason to install is annoyance with current Vista performance; I have no critical reason to update.
Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
"After much prevaricating and slipping out then pulling back, the first service pack for Windows Vista....."
sounds like an awful lover.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
I'm more interested to see how this affects the adoption rate ... or doesn't. It's been said businesses have been waiting for SP1 to make the move. The question is: was that all just talk or is it going to actually happen?
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=948343#method5
I use Vista at work because I'm going to need to know it eventually. Microsoft probably won't offer XP forever. Among many other problems that I eventually fixed before the service pack, I had a problem with my sound not working so I installed Service Pack 1. It fixed the sound problem, then broke my network adapter. After removing the service pack, the network came back but the sound broke again. And it's over an hour to install and another hour to uninstall.
Don't forget the slew of jokes that Vista SP1 will just reinstall XP...
stuff |
I tried the (two) public betas on my Vista Ultimate 64 partition. They all failed to install at 19%. I reported it on the forums, tried to send my logs to an email address they said they'd set up, and even identified which file was supposedly "corrupt" (the one it was installing actually).
For my trouble, I've been ignored, and I'm now going to have to reinstall the ENTIRE OS because some small part of it is supposedly corrupt (systems works fine) and they won't let me just fix that. Lovely. My Ubuntu install is so much better, I wish I didn't need the vista one.
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
I grabbed the X64 update from Microsoft's OEM website a few weeks ago.
First off, SP1 is a massive improvement. It installs a lot of bugfixes (including ones not released publicly before)... and it improves other stuff quite a bit. Disk performance is much better- you could argue that copy and paste tasks should not be slowed down by the speed of the OS, but it's improvement.
Overall, my Vista install rarely runs into errors- maybe one or two non-system apps are hanging a week. UAC got less annoying (it wasn't that bad to begin with).
It took an hour to install on my PC, and I didn't run into any issues. I think it helps Vista a lot. Honestly, I prefer Vista on newer machines; it's RAM heavy requiring 2GB+ to run well but RAM is very cheap nowadays and the x64 version works quite well; I had no driver issues personally.
(I still recommend backing up though. I always back up before a major update, whether it's XP, Vista, OS X or Ubuntu).
I usually try to tag everything vaporware.
This is great news and all, but personally I'm waiting for Windows 7 - the rumor is that it'll be released in 2009 (that's next year)... so I'm going to put off pursuing Vista, using the (hopefully sound) assumption that Microsoft will have learned from Vista's troubles.
Why bother with Vista now if I'll need to bother with Win7 in a year???
Few people play Quake 4 today as it was released roughly 1.5 years before it was ready for retail, then Activision expected the public to become guinea pig beta testers for a half-assed product. Microsoft should take a lesson, as Vista has become the same laughing stock as a video game for the exact same reasons. In other words, software companies need to make this quip their gospel: An Old Bull and a Young Bull were standing at the top of a hill overlooking a large meadow full of cows. The Young Bull says excitedly, "Let's run down there and fuck us a cow!" "No, son", says the Old Bull, "let's WALK down there and fuck them all."
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
Do not start the update procedure unless you do not need your machine for a while. On stage 2 of 3 on a fairly beefy box(5.1 vista experience) and it has been chugging for about 15 min and shows 2% done.
At least my mac is up.
It's not the size of your stack that matters, it's how you push and pop
Run for your lives! Seriously is this just like any other patch Tuesday or should I get in my mom's basement now and hunker down for a few weeks.
J/K. I'm always in my mom's basement.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Isn't it Server 2008 that upgrades to XP with a facelift?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216934&cid=17629948
went smooth as silk, even on the more complicated Vista Ultimate.
why do I mention it? well. this thread will be full of nasty, snarky lies. maybe i can balance things out a bit and thank the windows team for an update well done.
now if they could just turn their attention to the fail that is 'windows ultimate extras', that would be perfect.
God Hates Us All.
Vista Service Pack 1 rolls up 551 bug fixes which are broken down by category in that link. Many of these fixes were not available before even through more advanced sites such as MSDN or TechNet. So, now that SP1 is out the trend to watch for is if it actually spures adoption or just passes by unnoticed. I for one welcome..., err, did buy Vista because SP1 was imminent for it as my primary purchasing reason. SP1 incrementally improves Vista and through the simple realities of OEM distribution like it or not within a few years Vista will probably be at least 40%+ market share.
Shh.
I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, and yes, shock horror it does work just fine.
The system feels more responsive, and stuff happens as it should. This is the Vista that should've shipped, but where Vista has suffered Windows Server 2008 has gained; all the initial frustrations have been fixed in SP1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008, so consider Vista RTM a beta kernel for Win2k8. It is after all, the server market Windows isn't 95% prevalent in after all.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Microsoft is doomed. They're already loosing their most important customers: young people. Apple has me for now.
Any way to slipstream it with new boot loader also? For windows 64 that can use bios and EFI?
If not does MS have a ISO link to use with you key as any iso for 64bit or 32bit should work with your key I have a unused 32bit and 64bit full install disk and I have to sp1 disk with efi on the 64bit one.
I find your comment particularly amusing given that I've been watching a brand new 8 CPU Server 2008 machine copy 33GB (thirty three gigabytes) of data from a gigabit LAN connection for the last two days... the file transfer dialog says I only have 225 minutes to go!
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
you say "I have no critical reason to update." With all the inherent security misses with any new OS release from MS, which is better, losing your OS to a glitch or not doing anything and compromising your security? I state the obvious: back up your files and go for the SP updates. Chances are if you're running vista, you (hopefully) did this with your XP box not that long ago anyway. - McD's - 3 billion fat kids can't be wrong.
If the airspeed of an unladen african swallow is x and the service pack Vista is on is y and z equals the chance that pigs will fly then the chance that our company will ever use Vista can be represented as xyz. In other words we will use Vista... Never!
Your network sucks then, none of my 9 Windows 2008 servers (ranging from a VMware Server 1.0.4 VM with 512MB ram to a dual quad-core Xeon 2.0Ghz with 4GB ram) take any longer than any of my Windows 2003 R2 servers (same hardware range) to copy 40GB.
In your case, I would stop looking at Windows and start looking elsewhere - the network hardware, drivers et al?
Most people would care a lot more about XP-SP3.
Lets hope that with this Vista SP out, MS will release XP-SP3.
I read all those Win2008 makes a better desktop than Vista, and on a x64 system, so I gave it a try.
Compared to Vista x64 with SP1, Win 2008 ran all my software, was full x64, and the drivers worked for vista. Sound, Video. Codecs worked. Boots quicker, file system ran smoother, files copied at normal speeds.
Even vista after sp1 is still a dog... And god, I hate the new file explorer, I've had to revert back to Directory Opus..
Here's the source code: /*
// printf("Welcome to Windows 2000); // printf("Welcome to Windows XP");
TOP SECRET Microsoft(c) Project:Longhorn(TM) SP1
Estimated release date:2008
*/
#include "win95.h"
#include "win98.h"
#include "leopard.h"
char chew_up_some_ram[10000000];
void main () {
while (!CRASHED) {
if (first_time_install) {
make_10_gigabyte_swapfile();
do_nothing_loop();
search_and_destroy(FIREFOX | OPENOFFICEORG | ANYTHING_GOOGLE);
hang_system();
}
if (still_not_crashed) {
basically_run_windows_xp();
do_nothing_loop();
}
}
if (!DX10GPU()) {
set_graphics(aero, very_slow);
set_mouse(reaction, sometimes);
}
printf("Welcome to Windows Vista");
while (something) {
sleep(10);
get_user_input();
sleep(10);
act_on_user_input();
sleep(10);
flicker_led_promisingly(hard_disk);
}
creat_general_protection_fault();
}
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Don't mod funny, I am entirely serious.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I find it interesting that operating systems are more and more being treated like applications. Traditionally the OS was responsible for managing resources (Disk, Memory, etc.), controlling security, and coordinating activities (queues, jobs, etc.) Today the Windows OS is responsible for browsing the web, playing music, recording TV, and plotting world domination (OK, I added that last one...) Why should these things be included in the "operating system" mix? I would argue that even a windowing system is borderline (see X).
}#q NO CARRIER
Update didn't work for me on a Euro version of "Vista Ultimate English". It said my version was not supported. Is there a different US English version as opposed to some international English version?
An identical box plugged into the same (gigabit) switch and same (cat5e) cabling but running Server 2003 copied that volume of data from the same source in about 25 minutes. I started the transfers on Sunday night at roughly the same time and I watched it finish on one while the 2008 machine just did an extraordinary amount of disk thrashing and a great deal of what I'm going to go ahead and say is Not Copying Data Very Quickly.
At this point, it's just morbid fascination with how bad the software is.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
On both of my Windows systems, one a brand-new laptop and the other a 6 month-old desktop system, both running U.S. English versions of Vista Ultimate. I run Windows Update, tell it to check for new updates -- and no SP1 in the list.
Given that both machines are *very* different, I can't fathom why neither can see the update. And yes, I've looked at the Microsoft web site; none of the "can't see SP1" conditions applies to my machines. No, they aren't running SP1 already; I checked that, too.
Suggestions?
All about me
Technet and MSDN users can download a Vista ISO image that has SP1 already slipped streamed in.
Performance Side Notes...
After installing SP1, performance will initially be reset as all prefetch and superfetch optimizations are recalculated after installing SP1. To properly evaluate SP1 performance of Vista, the system must be used for a day or two so that Vista can once again assess the user's habits and software's data and load sequences.
So just like Vista RTM, if you try to benchmark the improved caching, load times, application performance, etc you need to actually USE the system for a day or two so that Vista can learn how to optimize applications that gives Vista the application and load time performance increases over a day one install or a standard XP installation. The same is true for SP1, as this information is discarded to work with the updated code in SP1 so it created new again.
This information was provided by Microsoft during the SP1 beta, and sadly, many of the review sites and people performance testing SP1 have NOT done this.
Sadly most Vista RTM or SP1 reviews are of a day one installation of Vista with no real world usage to optimize the applications with regard to prefetch, cachcing, and memory allocation (which now even includes GPU performance because of the GPU virtualization in Vista).
So as you read any reviews of Vista RTM or Vista SP1 performance reviews, check to see if they are using 'clean' day one installs, or have been using the machine for a couple of days so that it is able to use the intelligence in the caching and prefetching systems to speed up the OS and applications.
A day one Vista install with newly loaded benchmark software or applications compared to a Vista system running for a few days and the user actually running the benchmarks or applications during that time frame is up to a 20x performance difference in load and application performance times, and at the very least Vista's application and performace times are usually about 6x XP or a Day One Vista install.
Additional side note: SP1 also has many multi-user improvements that are not widely known or mainstream issues, so people that use Vista in Domains/Workgroups, or even at home with multi-users on the same system will see shared resources used more efficiently.
I was hoping to download and install this on my laptop. Unfortunately, I have one of the "no-no-bad-hardware" devises, so Windows Update is blocked for me.
It must be pretty decent when I am seeing more positive posts than negative posts on Slashdot of all places. I wonder if it will ever show better games performance than XP...I guess until then I can wait. Hard to upgrade when I have been happy with XP for awhile. They need a new XP service pack that messes up performance and they would probably see Vista get more use :)
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
On second thought, from context it seems that you meant Duke-Nuke'em Forever.
Then again, maybe the two meanings of DNF aren't that different.
Due to this failure, I have decided to begin the transition to a 64bit version of Gentoo on my Desktop (Vista Business64) and laptop (XP-Pro) after full backups of all critical files (thank god for Gmail) on 3/19/2008 because on 3/20/2008 I'm wiping Windows completely and starting the Gentoo Installations. Once those are completed and I have a true VM working, I will start the transition of the other Desktop and Laptop over to the same 64bit Gentoo.
It's nice having 2 laptops that are identical as it means the transition for the second one will be far shorter as I can simply copy over the settings and actual binaries from the other first unit. This means the transition should take less then 10 minutes after the backup has been completed on that unit and after all systems are converted with all backups restored from the external, I can then wipe the external and reformat the external into fat32 partitions for moving data to/from Windows boxes over sneaker net.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
There is only one kernel generation between the 2. And I sometimes forget WFWG and NT aren't the same.
Well I am finally getting a new computer, and I know that people on /. hate vista, fir seemingly good reasons, but is it okay for somebody who will be browsing the web (firefox ftw), word processing, and playing some SC? Bestbuy only offers computers with vista, even though I am happy with XP I don't want to waste money by wiping my hard drive of vista and installing ubuntu. Would I be better off getting a much better computer from a chinese place and using ubuntu, and how hard would it tbe to get used to ubunutu for a first time linux user. Not into the whole text based customize everything idea, just want it to go fast, be able to download torrents while swtiching between a movie and a word processor, which my computer can't currently do.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
having the usual triad of Microsoft entrenchment (Exchange + Office + AD) makes that an unnerving undertaking for our size. ...to be in that mess NOW?
you had me at #!
"Success through lowering your expectations!"
Seriously, I'm not seeing how, "Hey, Vista SP1 doesn't suck as hard as the initial release did!", actually should lead anyone to the conclusion that, "Vista is great!"
I see what they did there; they released an overly-hyped product that turned out to be utter crap at transferring files and a host of other things such as hardware compatibility which most users would just take for granted, then they over-hype the release of the service pack that allegedly brings the performance on some things up to minimally acceptable levels. What I'm still not hearing is any compelling reasons that Vista is a good OS.
My personal experience with Vista has been that it more-or-less works, but that it's nothing special, even if the ridiculous performance and compatibility drawbacks are corrected. I'm not seeing the value (it's not a cheap upgrade, and it demands high-end hardware that's compatible with it), much less any substantial improvements to the users experience. It's hard to describe an upgrade like this without invoking the Windows ME experience.
More relevant to the marketplace, Mac users think OS X is "fun" even if it has problems. Linux users often go for the "fun" factor too. Microsoft tried to convince people that Vista is somehow fun, but it's not; it has problems and making it not have severe, crippling problems (with the release of SP1) just makes it less "not fun" than it used to be. Last I heard, though, the fun premium content for Vista Extreme users is still vaporware.
I've been running Vista for about 16 months now. (Got it from MSDN, etc.). I ran both 32bit and 64bit editions, on two kinds of hardware. It's been a bumpy ride sometimes.
If at all possible, use the x64 edition. Yes, some OEM make this a pain, but try. Given this, my next suggestion seems obvious. Get more memory. The more, the better. I'd rather have 8G of DDR2-533 than 2G of DDR3 uber-awesome overclocked OMGBBQ ram, because caching works. If on an Intel integrated graphics, turn down some of the Aero stuff. Duh. If possible, just buy a cheap 8400GS, because even that will help.
SP1 helps. Some things are faster. Of course, I'm not seeing some of the problems others are. I recently shipped some ISOs over from machine to my server (Win 2008), and it just flew. Got about 600Mb over a 1Gb switched link.
All in all. Not one blue screen on the desktop, a couple on the laptop due a older bluetooth driver. Things seem plenty responsive and fast, but there is a breaking in period. Sure, it isn't "awesome", but ME it sure is not.
Be patient! Indexing and the prefetching stuff takes time, but it does work. I use Outlook (okay, I know, I know) a lot, and it fired up faster and faster after the first day or two.
Maybe I'm just nitpicking here, but I assume that Amazon warehouses do have actual shelves to store the stuff they sell.
what killed vista for me was that background services were constantly running spinning my harddrive. Since I
1. am on a laptop and run off the battery often
2. play games
this is totally unacceptable and made my laptop unusable. I even went so far as to disable the indexing service, but for some reason the machine continued to do *some* kind of processing on various files. I'd turn on the performance monitor to find that it was churning away, doing *something* to various large movie files.
Until the overactive services are addressed, I'm not touching vista again, as it just makes the computer unusable. If someone can comment on whether this has happened, I'd like to know.
It should be noted that after I went back to XP, I installed the google desktop, which does the same thing the vista file indexing does, but without the performance overhead. Whenever I'm using the computer for *anything* google desktop is smart enough to *immediately* stop indexing and let me get my work done. It only indexes when truly idle.
I'm browsing at a high point level, but I see a lot more people defending SP1 than people dissing it. In fact, don't think I've read any serious disses, just humor. What's with the apparent sense of insecurity?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I'm not running server software, just vista 32, and it takes me about 20 minutes to copy 30gb pre-sp1; I havn't tested sp1 yet.
But why do I still get the feeling that very few people ***CHOSE*** to upgrade to it but just accepted it because it came on their new PC and they couldn't do anything about it because XP had been artificially phased out by Microsoft?
In my view, those are not good indications that Vista is, in any way, a successful product.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
... he's more beautiful than I could possibly have imagined! Do I get 3 wishes?
They're 'inter-operable' now that the UK is cracking down on them. It's merely a good faith gesture on Microsoft's part.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
now I can go upgrade all of my vista machines in the house- let me see- 3 computers in here 2 in the living room, 2 in the bedroom and my laptop and umpc.. that makes 0 copies of vista in the house....
wow that certainly was the easiest upgrade I have ever done.
Let us pray for better gods...
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista SP1 fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Dell (a Core 2 Duo w/4 Gig 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 Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than SP1, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this......
Benchmark? I'd imagine it's a fairly long ordeal to really and accurately benchmark file copying Nah, it's easy, just do...
time for count in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
do
cp $count.a $count.b
done
Where $count.a are files of various sizes depending on what you want to benchmark.
See?
Do it on XP, Vista and Vista SP1 for us. Yeah, and you could post the average and standard deviations on those benchmarks too.
Thanks.
Oh wait, I forgot... There's a problem with this... You're probably not allowed to benchmark Vista. Have you read the EULA?
Deleted
I seem to have a problem with Vista and my monitor, or video driver, or even the video card. I can't tell which because whenever I change resolutions with my Nvidia Geforce 7900GTX my monitor turns into junk and from there I can either reboot or log in to the computer with remote desktop just so my monitor quits sending banding lines to the monitor.
:P Vista won't even let me install the monitor drivers for my LCD unless I hack them a little, then it complains about them not being signed anymore.
I found that if decrease my RAM speed from stock to 10Mhz less, I don't get the banding problems most of the time. It could also be related to the refresh rate, which Vista allows more options to change than XP does. I can't tell, because it seems very few people have this problem.
On the other hand, XP has no issues with my video card, so I have no idea how to solve the problem. This has been the first time that a Windows install has caused me problems, so maybe my luck with Windows is running out now that it knows I'm using Linux and Mac OS X more.
I also hate Vista's new file explorer. I'll have to look into the Directory Opus you mention (is it something like XTree Gold ? :) )
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
SP1 has "bricked" my laptop. Vista comes up eventually and says, after sitting for hours
on the "Installing Service Pack: Stage 3 of 3 52%" -
"You must reinstall Windows to acitvate."
Thank you very much, MicroSHAFT! Bastards!
Windows Server 2003 also was the better version of XP. It runs very smooth on a lowly EPIA 800 (P2-350MHz equivalent). XP is kind of a slouch on that system. I guess they think they won't sell enough Windows Server licences when it's not at least 'feeling' faster than their desktop offerings.
I use Outlook (okay, I know, I know) a lot
:)
If you willingly use that garbage, then well, you must enjoy pain. Thank you for the insight of what a typical Vista user tolerates. Now I'm 100% convinced I do not want to be anywhere near it.