Windows Vista SP1 Hands-On Details

babyshiori writes "Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate! The build is the lead-up to the actual service pack, which will be made available to even more testers at a later date. 'In our early tests with the beta, we saw some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds. Microsoft is also touting improvements in "the speed of copying and extracting files," so we tested a few of those scenarios. We noted a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totaling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the aforementioned HP Compaq notebook.'"

Wow

[by Anonymous Coward]

Exciting. Really.

Re:

[postbigbang (761081)]

Mod parent up.

When you guys get excited about a pre-release of a service pack, you're in enormous need of fresh air.

Parent wasn't a troll. Parent has healthy sarcasm.... on what must be the most enormous news dead night of the year, or perhaps decade.

Nothing fixes Vista because XP wasn't broken. Lipstick on that pig won't get on your collar. Trust me on this.

Re:Wow

[danielk1982 (868580)]

>When you guys get excited about a pre-release of a service pack, you're in enormous need of fresh air.

Why shouldn't people be interested. I use Vista day to day, I'm curious if some of the issues (performance mainly) I came across have been addressed.

>Nothing fixes Vista because XP wasn't broken.

Before Vista came out, if the collective was to be believed, XP was pointless, because win2k was the pinnacle of Windows OS. If there's nothing wrong with XP, then use XP.

(Also there was nothing wrong OSX Tiger what was the point of Leopard? There was nothing wrong with Gnome 2.14, whats the point of Gnome 2.20 .. etc.)

Re:Wow

[mwnyc (1016752)]

Hooray!

Windows Vista: The Wow ...starts now!

Windows Vista SP1: Small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook ...will be made available to even more testers at a later date!

I can hardly sleep.

Main changes coming with SP1

[phillips321 (955784)]

http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195414376.jpg [forumpix.co.uk] taken from http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/yes_virginia_there_is_a_vista_sp1.html [microsoft-watch.com]

Re:

[Jugalator (259273)]

Hmm, I think this one is more thorough:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_sp1.asp [winsupersite.com]

Also note that this SP will contain hundreds of fixes as usual (especially retroactive changes and hotfixes released over the year on MSDN), so this are the major, most noticeable ones.

Yes, but...

[kwabbles (259554)]

will it allow me to do things like run applications and operate a computer now? :)

Service packs:

[by Anonymous Coward]

Doing the work to install
the fixes to the OS in the
same way as they always have because the one
thing they've never done
over the decades,
and we know it, is to thoroughly check
over an initial release
again and again to make sure that it's good enough
and therefore we are all
expecting that there will be many
different service packs to fix the
results.

Re:Service packs:

[Ajehals (947354)]

Maybe he should post it again and people will get it.

It's really kind of clever.

[by Anonymous Coward]

No its one of those "poems" where you just write some prose and toss in line breaks .

The message has nothing directly to do with the "prose". Read just the first word of each line. If you still don't get it, google the "definition of insanity".

Re:Yes, but...

[PPH (736903)]

In order to proceed, Vista needs to increment the instruction pointer.

[Allow] or [Cancel]

Re:Yes, but...

[ctr2sprt (574731)]

But, I have to ask, (excluding those of you with Tablet PC's, because everything I've read indicates that Vista is pretty nifty on them) why?

My experience is that it Just Works. Everything is set up with a minimum of hassle and prompting, the defaults are sensible, and most of the eye candy has at least some redeeming value. (Like alt-tab shows you a small version of the windows, which is updated in realtime.) UAC is basically SEWindows, and it gets the same treatment as SELinux does (immediately disabled). But it's hard for me to fault Vista for that, since it is pretty much what every security expert was screaming for Microsoft to add.

Plus, Vista actually feels much more like it has a unified UI. I'm sure a MacOS user can tell you that the UI is more than just a window frame and menu bar: it's the "feel" of the whole thing that matters. Well, everything that comes with Vista (with a few aggravating exceptions, which fortunately I've never had to use more than once so far) has that "feel." If you've ever used IE7 on XP, you've probably noticed how utterly weird and confusing it is. Well, in Vista, it makes complete sense. (I still don't use it, of course, but I was tempted.)

I'm not a huge Vista booster or anything. The above makes me sound like I am, but you asked for reasons to use Vista, not reasons not to. But when I have to use the OS -- this computer is mainly a gaming rig -- I like it better than XP. And so long as I don't have to do any serious work, I much prefer it to KDE and GNOME. (For serious work, I need Unix. If I had to make do with screen and Alt+Fn, I would.)

Re:Yes, but...

[baldass_newbie (136609)]

My experience is that it Just Works.

My experience is that it just doesn't. Couldn't get Windows Update to run even sending the update log and system config info repeatedly to Microsoft Tech Support. Seems they couldn't figure it out, either.
I'm back on XP (at least for gaming) and using MEPIS or OS X for productivity and multi-media respectively.
But I'm glad it works for you. I really am.

SP or New OS?

[nbannerman (974715)]

From TFA;

According to Microsoft, typical load times for the final version should range from 30 to 60 minutes. The installation requires 7GB of free hard-drive space (some of which will be reclaimed after the installation isn complete), though the finalized install file itsel is expected to be a 50MB download via Windows Update.

Is this a service pack, or a fresh install replacing most of the core files? Really, should a service pack take that long to install, and require that much space? To put it into context, after a year of use, this XP machine's Window's directory totals somewhere in the region of 3gb.

Looking at my current Vista laptop, I wouldn't be able to install the SP without removing some of my music files first...

Is this a joke?

Re:SP or New OS?

[Pieroxy (222434)]

It is not a joke. It is a preview. Not even a beta. Whining on the HDD requirements at that stage seems a bit stupid, really.

Re:

[jacksonj04 (800021)]

I'm surprised they're calling 50MiB a service pack. Weren't XPSP 1 and 2 much larger than that? Or is it more of a 'Service Pack' which changes a few graphical tweaks, and happens to be released at the same time as another 300MiB worth of critical updates? All that said I've just upgraded to OS X 10.5.1, which was (as far as I can tell) a few fiddling little bug patches somehow bloated to over 100MiB. Perhaps the amount of space taken is inversely proportional to the actual improvements made to the OS.

All O

Re:

[Professor_UNIX (867045)]

I'm surprised they're calling 50MiB a service pack.

The 50 MB download is probably just the download helper that then downloads the other 7 gigs and lets you resume if your dialup connection gets interrupted over the next several weeks.

Times

[SnoopJeDi (859765)]

Don't trust the times this article points out too solidly, they certainly don't sound like they were derived using proper statistics. More likely, they probably just booted it up once before installing the SP, timed it, and then booted it up after, and timed it.

Could be wrong, but whatever, let's party, SP1 is near!

Re:Times

[RobertM1968 (951074)]

Could be wrong, but whatever, let's party, SP1 is near!

Not to sound too much like a troll or anything, but until it is downloadable, I for one will not consider it "near".

SP1 was scheduled for release this past summer (from MS announcements shortly after Vista Consumer release).

SP1 was then delayed to "by the end of the year" (from comments made a month ago)

SP1 (from MS's latest comments which you can find here: http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2218/071115vistaskip/ [itworld.com] ) is now scheduled for release in Q1 2008.

I guess "near" is a subjective thing... but as of right now, it seems they really have no real release strategy... until it is done, I am not betting on "near" or even "sometime soon"

What really interests me is that they are quite well aware of the need to address these issues quickly if they want to see a greater adoption of Vista by businesses and/or home users considering upgrading - yet the release date, for a Service Pack that only addresses some of the issues, keeps slipping.

Yes, I agree it is a good thing that they don't release the SP till it's ready - but it kinda scares me that they need to put in so much time to fix the issues that they are addressing - and scarier still, that in trying to do so, their release date keeps slipping... it kind of makes me think that when they looked at the issues and underlying code, they collectively said "Wow, this is really a mess... we need a LOT more time than we thought if we are gonna fix this" (well, I think doubling the release time is a LOT more time... though considering their recent OS release schedule, they may disagree).

It makes me seriously wonder how severely wrong some of their programming decisions (or "push it out the door, ready-or-not" decision) with Vista really were - and how adequately a Service Pack can really address those issues. (is this gonna be just another band-aid?)

Typical OS timeline

[binaryspiral (784263)]

This is really nothing new, Windows 9x, 2k, and XP were all turds when they were first released. Driver maturity, application refinements, hardware improvements, and service packs all make the experience more tolerable.

But I'm sick of the status quo and expected a much better OS when Vista was first released. If it took 9 months of driver development and OS improvements - then it shouldn't have been released 9 months early.

Epic Disaster

[aldheorte (162967)]

Vista is a not an epic disaster because of:

1. Performance.
2. Security.
3. Anything that early technical adopters care about.

It it is an epic disaster because of:

1. Lack of backward compatibility (software and hardware).
2. Non-technical people being aware of (1).

Therefore, testing whether files copy 2% faster is like exhaustively examining a bolt in a tanker that has run aground and split in half.

Re:Epic Disaster

[JebusIsLord (566856)]

They actually tried to fix a perfectly broken API, full of gaping security holes left over from the innocent, pre-internet days of the early 90s. This work started with XP SP2, which you may recall also broke a lot of software.

But will it increase sales of Vista?

[usul294 (1163169)]

Thanks to all of the issues with Vista, its got a bad reputation. It requires a modern computer, yet most people are happy with what they have, and don't have any reason to migrate to Vista. I am actually extremely satisfied with Vista, but I got Vista Premium from my school, so I didn't pay directly for it. I also have a fairly beefed up computer (3 GB RAM). The problem isn't bugs or boot times, its running times, Vista is just about as fast on 3 GB RAM as when I has 1 GB RAM and was using XP. Now that I've gotten used to it, I like the way Vista does things. But again, people like me don't decide Vista's success, its people who went out and got a $600 computer 5 years ago, and have only known XP. What percentage of people who use a computer today ever used Windows 3.1? Windows 95 through XP are very similar in terms of operation. Vista is a fairly big shift, and getting millions of people who only understand one set of GUIs to change GUIs is an almost impossible task.

But what can it do that XP can't...?

[Joce640k (829181)]

The big question isn't whether or not Vista is acceptably good, it's that it doesn't do a single thing that XP can't. In many cases it does things worse/slower.

So is there a reason to upgrade from XP? I don't see one.

If you hadn't got the Premium version for free would you have paid $400 for it?

Too late

[dbolger (161340)]

I bought a new computer shortly after Vista was released. My old PC had been getting on in years, and when it died I picked up my current laptop to replace it. I was a bit uncertain about using Vista since I had heard so many bad reviews about it, but it came pre-installed so I figured I would give it a go. After a few months of using it, I realised I was right to be worried. At least on my laptop, it was slow as hell, and buggy. It would freeze for no reason, and crash out of programs that XP had run without a hitch. Several of my friends had similar experiences. I considered going back to the store and requesting a tech have a look at it, but having worked in a similar place myself, I figured they wouldn't be able to do anything that I hadn't tried myself (and at the very best, they would send it away to be "looked at" and I would be sans laptop for a few weeks). So instead, I uninstalled the OS, and reinstalled XP SP2. My machine is now flying along and hasn't crashed since.

The desktop that died on me had been running Windows 2000 for over five years, after which I upgraded to XP when I friend offered to give me an install CD he no longer needed. I ran 2k for that long because it met my needs, and was more stable and powerful than the versions of Windows I had used previously (3.11/95/98/ME). The only reason I switched was out of curiosity, and with SP2, XP became the best Windows I had ever used.

I wasn't curious about Vista, but because of circumstances, I ended up trying it anyway. It was an absolutely terrible experience, and I am so glad to be back to my nice, stable XP. So, there's a lesson for Microsoft to learn. They had an opportunity to get a user onboard with their latest OS, but they blew it so badly, that I am now likely to keep on using XP for the next five years, and if I need to switch operating systems then, I am more likely to go with Linux, or buy a Mac.

just wondering...

[WwWonka (545303)]

Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds.

...does it also now display the XP logo at startup?

Windows XP SP3 please

[chowells (166602)]

Personally I'd much rather they get around to releasing XP SP3.

Vista isn't on my personal radar, nor of my employers. But installing a fresh XP and having to install 80 odd updates is a PITA.

Re:

[Nimey (114278)]

It wouldn't surprise me if IBM still does for their mainframe stuff. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if they still offer support for old System/360s and older AS/400s.

Re:Windows XP SP3 please

[sgbett (739519)]

now would you beleive it!

6 years ago...

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01-05-001-04-NW-LF-KN [linuxtoday.com]

Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 16:01:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds [e-mail]
To: Kernel Mailing List [e-mail]
Subject: And oh, btw..

In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as
being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as
the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided
that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the
same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.

today ...

http://kernel.org/ [kernel.org]

The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.35.4 2007-11-17 17:44 UTC F V C Changelog

Re:Windows XP SP3 please

[Karellen (104380)]

Sorry, I'm a huge Debian fan (I run Sid on all my systems) but I feel forced to point out that even they do not support releases for 6 years. 6 years ago the current release was Potato, released in August 2000. Neither that, nor Woody released in July 2002, are still supported by Debian. Sarge, released in June 2005, will likely only be supported for another 6 months until April 2008 if the Debian Security FAQ on release lifespan[0] is accurate.

Yes, there are upgrade paths to new versions of Debian, but they also exist from old to new versions of Windows.

[0] http://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan [debian.org]

90 seconds considered good?

[antifoidulus (807088)]

Macbooks can boot into Leopard in about 30 seconds, and we can start our 7 year old Linux boxes at work in less than a minute....how does Microsoft get away with this kind of stuff?

Re:

[dal20402 (895630)]

... and my Macbook Pro will come out of standby in about 1 second (plus however long the wireless handshake takes). Plus, it's reliable enough that if I put it into standby I *know* it will come out. I basically never reboot or hibernate. No need to futz around and remove functionality just so I can open my laptop and be working more quickly.

Why haven't either Microsoft or the makers of any Linux distro been able to get standby right? Mac notebooks have been like this since OS X came out in 2001.

what is the case for running Vista? I forget

[victorvodka (597971)]

I know it's new and it's got some user interface changes, but for the stuff I do with a computer, is there a reason I should be running Vista, or that I shouldn't uninstall Vista from my next computer and upgrade to the light, fast, relatively DRM-free OS known as Windows XP? So far no one has presented a compelling case for using a OS that runs slower and requires twice the memory of XP. It could be I'm missing something really really super important here. Is it that we're just supposed to run whatever is newest? Because by that logic we should vote for whatever presidential candidate is youngest.

Different security model

[tknd (979052)]

Nearly all Windows XP computers are configured incorrectly where every user runs as admin. The only places I see Windows XP configured correctly was at my old lab in college where everyone ran as a normal user and not admin and in certain work places. In addition to that, certain pieces of software require you to be running as admin rather than just a regular user making running as a regular user in windows XP a pain in the ass.

Vista changes that through UAC and the "admin" account not really being admin

Some content please

[rueger (210566)]

Woe be those who criticize Slashdot editorial practice, but was that about the most pathetic "review" that you've ever seen? For those who haven't read TFA, all of the comments here about boot times are because that the only substantive thing mentioned in the article. Really:

Microsoft says, the service pack beta improves stability, performance, and reliability when reactivating a machine from Hibernate or Suspend mode; enhances device-driver support; increases security; and adds support for new standards such as Extended File Allocation Table (intended to enhance flash storage on notebooks, not desktops). ...

... we saw some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds.

... We noted a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totalling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the aforementioned HP Compaq notebook.

In another test, we used Nero 7 Ultra on an Acer Aspire 5630 Core 2 Duo laptop to add files to a disk image. After we installed SP1, The notebook built the disk image about 7 percent faster.

Yes. That's it. Nothing more. I don't know who to complain about, the article submitter or the Slashdot ed that approved it.

Blocked program at start-up

[Shemmie (909181)]

I have to say one of the most broken features (from a design POV) is the blocking of start-up programs. Great, so users are secured against programs that might start up without their permission or knowledge. Great, so I can right-click on the tray, scroll to the blocked program, and left-click to start it up.

However - where the Hell is the checkbox to remember my choice?.

Having to do this on every boot is crazy. It was funny that this issue was on the "Windows 7 Wishlist" - it should've been one of the first updates out the door after RTM, and at the latest, SP1.

In case anyone still has nightmares about this, there is a work-around apparently - http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&p=6509411 [slickdeals.net]

Same shit, different kernel

[gerrysteele (927030)]

I'm biased. I'm a unix/linux user. Have been since 2002 or so. I gradually developed a hatred of windows when, as a windows 98 customer (not a windows user, I paid for it to brceive a service), I got bored having to reinstall my OS. I used XP briefly for a while especially for games and such. Then i Stopped using it. I became a sole nix user. I had no need to play games because I had little to no free time because of work. Recently I've made the switch to ubuntu and also switched jobs.

This has allowed me some more gaming time. For this reason I bought a nice laptop with a good on board graphics card to play games with. It came with Vista, and that I left on it and dual booted with Ubuntu Gutsy. I bought a few games I'd missed out on in the previous year or two.

I began thinking its been a while since I actually used windows, perhaps I'm judging it harshly. So i decided to try and give a go as my main OS as much as I could. Much of my work is done by logging into other machines via ssh so I thought I might not miss Linux too much and I knew putty was a very good terminal emulator implementation.

So, I tried to install Brothers In Arms: Earned in blood. I Didn't get very far. It just did nothing on clicking the installer. Some searching later shows that this game doesn't work on vista. Apparently the system they used to ensure that you dont lend the CD to your friends or such also ensures that it doesn't work on vista. I had similar problems with one other game I bought.

At this point I was quite happy with Vista aside from that it seemed to have used 12GB of diskspace before i'd even booted it up for the first time. It was shiny and slick. It was fast to boot. I had very little on the local machine itself apart from the games. I'd copied some video files and installed all the games from the Orange Box too.

I played through all of Portal/HL2/HL2E1 and I'd noticed that start up takes around five times longer than it did in the first week. The same performance crap I had experienced with 98. Same shit, different kernel. Aside from that I found that some days the hard disk would begin to thrash _all_ the time. To get rid of them I had to kill system processes and turn of much talked about features.

I was getting annoyed. I felt vindicated. It was also starting to crash, It just does it more elegantly than XP. Steam games had weird start up problems involving minimising and maximising a dozen times.

The internets informed me that Orange Box games work well in wine (which I didn't believe). I've never had a great deal of luck with anything working in wine. But vista was getting beyond a joke and I really thought considering the graphics card I had I should be seeing better game performance. So i thought I'd reinstall my laptop with XP/Gutsy and be done with it. However I couldn't find an XP disk. So I just went with gutsy.

I couldn't believe how flawless Orange Box games went on. Honestly, wine is a serious engineering achievement. Everything works. perfectly.

Goodbye Microsoft, and may our only encounters be the ones in which someone pays me large amounts of money to deal with you.

Vista Supporters' Rebuttals

[PPH (736903)]

Should appear shortly. As soon as their systems finish booting.

1 minute, 51 seconds?

[Trogre (513942)]

On a Core 2 Duo? Windows Vista usually takes 1 minute 51 seconds to boot, and a little head jiggle, er, 20 second reduction is supposed to make me happy?

Something is seriously wrong here. Perhaps not limited to just Vista in this case, but something is badly wrong if modern computers with all their supercomputing glory take four times as long to boot today than they did 15 years ago.

C'mon guys, get parallel boot dependencies going properly. Yes I'm talking more to the Linux/BSD crowd now.

Still being pushed

[Trogre (513942)]

It's funny the lengths MS is going to in order to hasten Vista adoption. Halo 2 for Windows was released not long ago. That's right, Halo 2. The old game from about 3 years ago that ran on a Pentium 750. Now the PC version is nothing special (as with Halo 1 suitably crippled to make the XBox look good), but it requires, you guessed it, Vista.

Of course there's no reason the game code actually needs Vista to run and in fact there's a patch (in the form of a DLL) that lets you run it under Windows XP but I just find it interesting how desparate MS seems in obsoleting XP.

Re:40 second boot time an improvement?

[kailoran (887304)]

Maybe we could even have the ability to write the memory conents to disk before turning the computer off, so when turned on again, it would resume where we've left off. I'd call it "hibernation".

Re:40 second boot time an improvement?

[Professor_UNIX (867045)]

I'd call it "hibernation".

Hibernation sounds like something you'd attribute to a bear though. When you wake the bear up from his hibernation prematurely he's going to be pissed and maul anyone around him. I prefer a much nicer term like "safe sleep" which brings to my mind visions of a baby sleeping in a crib peacefully under the watchful protective gaze of its parents.

Re:40 second boot time an improvement?

[Znork (31774)]

Yes, well, one would think so, but it turns out that the ability to extract revenue and spend billions isnt what drives progress or encourages development.

It turns out competition is.

So much for granting monopoly rights to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts'.

Re:40 second boot time an improvement?

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

40 seconds? I wish. Where did you get that number from? The article talks about how the startup time has been cut down from 1:50 to 1:30. Also, I seem to recall Bill Gates talking a few years ago about how they were going to get the startup time to like 30 seconds or so. Now we're "impressed" when it only takes 3 times that...

Re:40 second boot time an improvement?

[tompaulco (629533)]

My TRS-80 CoCo still boots in about 3/4 of a second. The fact that it still boots at all is an achievement in itself.

Re:

[cheater512 (783349)]

You'd think that with modern technology and multi-billion dollar budgets they could do it properly.

My Pentium 3 laptop will boot from power on to console (including BIOS) in 18 seconds.
Add another 10 for KDE.

You'll never see Vista booting from power on to fully functional system (not slow and laggy with things still loading) in under 30 seconds.

No need for making ram images or that kind of nonsense.
Thats like applying a bandaid to a amputated arm.
It is infact possible to make a computer boot fast without an

Re:Just Installed..

[QuantumRiff (120817)]

Disable Indexing.. It drove me nuts when I installed it on a "test system" at the office. Between the indexer, and the defragger trying to access the disk when it thinks you don't need it, it seemed to drop the overall speed significantly

Re:

[dal20402 (895630)]

I have a 256MB XP SP2 system, basically stock, in my office. Your definition of "acceptable" and mine are very different. Simply having Firefox and Word open, with a couple windows each, and swapping between the two causes pageouts and enormous delays.

XP is acceptable for basic use with 512MB. Not 256MB, IMHO.

Now Vista, on the other hand, doesn't even seem truly happy in 1GB. I have 1GB and 2GB Vista systems that I use, both with reasonable or better CPU power. The 1GB system is slow and prone to pauses

Not true...

[denzacar (181829)]

Being comprised of mostly carbon atoms, if you polish the turd long enough at the right pressure and temperature - it will turn into a diamond.

Superman could do that.
Only I don't think anyone would like shaking hands with him later.

Re:How I crashed pre-SP1 RC Vista

[wwahammy (765566)]

DRM had nothing to do with it. In order to make sure that non-multimedia I/O and processing didn't overwhelm the I/O and processing needed for content (audio and video), processes and I/O are prioritized. Multimedia runs at the highest priority. From what I remember, Microsoft said that it could only affect gigabit network connections that are running at full speed (basically never on a desktop PC). I think they said they're going to tweak the behavior so it can decide better whether non-multimedia related processes and I/O should be limited. Additionally, there was a bug in the method used to decide how much bandwidth should be allocated to a network connection. The total bandwidth allocated for network connections was equally split across all network adapters even if you had say a gigabit adapter connected and an wireless adapter that wasn't. This caused the issue to show up more often than intended because oftentimes the gigabit connection was getting cut in half without a real reason.

All that said, I think the idea of prioritizing multimedia is fine but there should be a method to turn it off (perhaps a registry setting).