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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."
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=948343#method5
I work in the IT field, use Vista 100% on my laptop and have several clients.
I snagged SP1, the latest pre release build and it has been fine.
Things seem 'faster', copying files, something that use to take weeks now takes as long as it should.
I still get the random spoolsv crashing for no reason but that was there before SP1.
None of my applications break although I don't use anything custom or home grown or vertical.
The install took a while - three stages with I believe a few stages each. I made a backup of my data prior just in case it went blue. No problems with the install/patch.
captch: robbed
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).
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
"Microsoft probably won't offer XP forever."
Windows XP Professional 'Direct OEM and Retail License Availability' ends June 30, 2008. And 'System Builder License Availability' ends January 31, 2009.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx
So, Microsoft isn't going to offer Windows XP in a few months. As far as an OEM license goes.
"While you're watching the quiet ones, a noisy one will fucking kill you!" - George Carlin
SP1 RTM has been available for quite some time from the technet site. We've been using it for quite awhile now. BTW, the spoolsv issue is with an HP Print driver, generally from a print server. You need to get an updated hpbmini.dll - minor rev 16 and greater will work. Older versions don't understand an OS that starts with version "6" and just crash the spooler. You can delete the driver using printmanagement.msc.
Luckily today was a slow day at work so I did various benchmark tests both before and after installing SP1. This was all done on my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop, Core 2 Duo 2Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, and a freshly defragmented 200GB 7200RPM Seagate HD. Not a mobile Lan Party screamer, but it gets the job done well enough.
Boot times dropped, both with and without ReadyBoost enabled (using a 4GB 150x SD card) by about 10 seconds, ending up with 1:56 clean and 1:45 with ReadyBoost.
ATTO Disk Benchmark showed a .
Copying 1GB of JPG files from one partition to another dropped from 1:31 to 1:09, and to the network from 1:35 to 1:06.
3DMark06 scores very slightly increased, PCBench05 scores slightly decreased.
The graphics test in CoH OF went from 59.7/28.8/7.9 up to 59.7/28.9/9.2
So no huge improvements, but overall things are just a bit more snappy.