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Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Expected Tomorrow
arcticstoat writes "After dishing out a few copies of the beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to select customers in October, Microsoft has now decided to let the general public get their hands on the beta of the service pack, starting from tomorrow. The beta of the service pack will be made available via Microsoft's Customer Preview Program on 4 December, and it includes all the updates since Service Pack 1, as well as a few other bits and pieces. Most notably, Microsoft says that Service Pack 2 'improves performance for Wi-Fi connection after resuming from sleep mode,' and adds the Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, ID strings for VIA's Nano CPU and support for the exFAT file system for large flash devices."
You can copy the two driver files (%systemroot\system32\uexfat.dll and %systemroot%\system32\drivers\exfat.sys) from a Vista installation into the same place in Windows XP or 2003, and by adding a few registry entries (search the web for "exFAT File System Driver", I will not link to random blogs here) you enable full support for it.
This trick works right now with Vista SP1. <tinfoilhat>MS could still disable the drivers from executing on anything lower than Vista in a future update</tinfoilhat> but you should still be able to use the present driver revision to access exFAT on XP/2003.
You sir do not seem to know what you are talking about. I've played around with Vista quite a bit. I still prefer XP on my laptop but that's because I'd rather have my Vista license for my desktop PC. (I don't pirate. If I don't want something I don't buy it.) On my desktop I have 0.2% of my CPU in use with 1.2GB of memory in use when my system is in what *I* consider "idle".
System Specs: Intel Q6600 Quad Core, 8GB DDR2 RAM (Crucial), x2 8800GT w/ 1GB RAM each, XONAR D2X Sound Card, 780i-SLI motherboard. I have currently two 500GB WD hard drives running as a JBOD RAID using SATA.
For applications I have Pidgin (with several chat accounts running) and Steam with full Aero eye candy turned on. A simple static background with the world at night and the Windows Gadgets on the right hand side monitoring my CPU and Memory usage. Typically I have 2-3 browsers open with 5-12 tabs open in each (different reasons). I'm seeding several torrents for various files (all legal) pretty much at all times via uTorrent and I only reboot my PC once a month when I update Vista.
Oh and I have AVAST! running, which I'm about to replace with AVG free again. I keep hearing how they no longer update the definitions in the free version, but I keep getting them on my XP so what the heck, I'll use it until I can't. I really don't like AVAST! as I have to turn it off when playing FarCry2 (causes lag from open file checks that affects my look speeds) but I don't have to turn of AVG.
My CPU usage at idle is at 0.2% and my memory usage is at about 1.2GB. This is according to Process Explorer and Task manager, not the stupid widgits on my desktop (though they say about the same). The usage only goes up when I'm playing a video game.
Before you cry out that there is a lot of memory in use, most of that is being held "ready" for other programs as they require more memory. Vista does that. It is actually a good thing. Just means faster access times for the program.
So yea. I'm positive 98% of all the Vista hate is irrelevant now unless you have 1GB of RAM or less. If you have 2GB and can run DirectX 9 you have no issues with Vista, or shouldn't be. There might be an exception to it:
My laptop came with Vista Home Basic (32-bit). Vista ran like a dog. The laptop specs were not bad (2GB RAM, AMD64 dual core turion, and an ATI video card sharing the system memory) but it was noticeably just bad. I have an OEM of Vista Ultimate x64. I was deciding between throwing XP x64 or Ultimate x64 on the laptop so i tried the Vista Ultimate for 30 days.
I am now certain that whatever Microsoft did to remove "features" such as Remote Desktop and Aero from Vista did more than just remove those features. The performance difference was INCREDIBLE. Vista Ultimate absolutely flew.
To be sure I tried installing Home Basic again. DELL includes OEM install discs now and puts the bloatware and drivers on separate discs. No more image CD/DVDs thankfully. Performance was still noticebly worse when compared to Vista Ultimate x64.
Personally I think they screwed up the registry a bit. Anyone who has made a mistake there knows only a full install ever gets the PC right again afterwords and all sorts of unexpected things happen when stuff goes wrong there. I just don't have any hard proof, but then neither do most people who seem to complain about Vista beyond their PCs only having 1GB or less of RAM.
For the curious I settled on XP x64 on my laptop. Partly because I had the license already and partly because I fell in love with it after using it on my old tower. That's a solid 64-bit OS, and has been since 6 months after its release when the drivers came out for everything.
I agree with a lot of what you said, but are you serious with point one and OS X?
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html
Please show me which service pack made that many changes.
Ok, let's be serious for a second, have you actually read the 300 features list?
In perspective, if MS detailed changes as 'tiny' as Apple does and try to tout them as features, the list for Vista alone would have been over '5000' new features. (We could argue that Apple is smarter about marketing, but they are also conning people by doing this as well.)
Here I will open the link and scroll randomly to the middle and pick some of the 'features' to list and talk about.
(Networking)
- New AirPort Menu
- Self-Tuning TCP
(Parental Controls)
- Simple Account Setup
- Time Limits and Bedtimes
- Activity Logging
- Remote Control & Monitoring
- Dynamic Web Filter
- Web Filter Overrides
Now look at these seriously... They are laughable.
A New AirPort menu is worthy of mentioning as a new feature?
Self tuning TCP is actually one of the few halfway reputable.
Parental Controls, uh? How can they even make this list being serious. These are not 'features' but new 'options' in a dialog box for the Parental Controls.
Now in contrast just to these items ONLY, MS released Vista with features list like this:
Improved Networking
Improved Parental Controls
See how this works? If you are a Fanboi or not paying attention it looks like: MS Vista two Features compared to OS X eight features. It is this level of awareness and poor journalism and poor MS marketing that leaves people thinking this.
For Vista, 'Improved Networking' there are over 200 'detailed' changes in the OS from the self-tuning to the network stack itself being new. 'Parental Controls', there are over 300 features that range from Game Rating restrictions to a new UI for parental controls as well as about 100 policies that can be used.
Ok, so you get an idea of this?
Now you were talking about Service Packs so lets take a look at a couple from the past years. And I will even let you use the 300 features as a goal for OS X here...
XP SP2 was the addition of recompiled and more managed code from the Windows 2003 project. This is why XP SP2 is faster than XP RTM or XP SP1. In this alone there are close to 100 items changes from the core changes applied in SP2.
If we were going to look at XP SP2 and list changes using the 'Apple Method' it would start to look like this really fast:
Networking
- New Taskbar WiFi Menu
- New WiFi Connection Manager
- New Integrated WiFi Authenication systems (WPAv2, etc)
- New WiFi network notification system
- New Firewall with inbound and outbound policies
- Updated TCP connection limitations to fight Spyware
- IPv6 support
- New VPN/IPSEC policies
- New Security Center
On and on and on, and these are just off the top of my head, if I pulled out the item by item changes provided to IT professionals, we could fill pages of 'features', and it would be far more than 300.
Now on to Vista SP1. The entire OS was replaced with the Windows 2008 server build of the binaries. That is a lot of changes, in fact a year's newer OS replaced at the core level.
Here is a link to the 'Overview' of changes, which is a 'light' list as MS 'defines' features/changes. On this page alone there are about 100.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749132.aspx
Now move on to a broader list for IT professions:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618.aspx
You will find about another 300-400 features/changes, and this is more detailed to the level of the crap Apple would list, as they demonstrate from their famous '300 list' you referenced.
A