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PC World Tests Final Version of Vista SP1
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Feb 07, 2008 03:18 PM
from the could-be-worse dept.
from the could-be-worse dept.
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.'"
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Submission: PC World tests final version of Vista SP1 by Anonymous Coward
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Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Funny)
Now thousands of snarky PC techs everywhere will be wearing T-shirts saying: " *I AM* Vista SP2! "
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Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Insightful)
On most hardware, the older Windows 2000 had a huge performance advantage over its newer cousin--tirelessly proved out in benchmark after benchmark--that never actually went away until...ever. Microsoft just stopped supporting the older OS without special contracts, and people just sort of stopped using Windows 2000 in general. And so XP became the new performance baseline.
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Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Insightful)
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated. But that is where my praise ends: it might be small, but it was still difficult to use in a lot of places. Windows XP did actually improve the usability quite a bit, although style wise it was a mixed blessing. And since SP2 there is no comparison: XP is just a lot more secure.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated
Compare it with a fresh install of NT 4. I used to run NT 4 on a 166MHz machine with 64MB of RAM (close to top of the line when NT4 was released), and it was very nippy. When I installed IE 4, it got a lot slower, and IE 5 didn't speed things up much. 2K was comparable in terms of responsiveness to NT4 with the IE-based shell, but NT4 with the old Explorer was significantly faster. I didn't notice the slowdown at the time, because it came with so many new UI features, but it was clear when I did a side
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Funny)
I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated.
NT4 ran quite comfortably on 100Mhz-class Pentiums with 40MB+ of RAM. Windows 2000..... would not.
I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.
What. The. Fuck.
Where does this sort of stupidity come from ? Windows Vista, even in full-blown Aero mode, runs fine *right now* on machines 5+ years old (anything Ghz-class, with 1GB+ RAM and what is today US$30 video card has the performance to do so - so you can feasibly go back around 7 years, with a cheap video card upgrade). XP will also run well on machines that were around *10 years ago* (300Mhz P2s with 384M-512M RAM).
(Of course, discussions like this completely miss the point that how well something runs on very old hardware is basically irrelevant.)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Funny)
Good News: The integrated spyware/trojan horse functionality has seen significant performance enhancements. The overhead imposed on the various systems that this functionality interacts with has been significantly reduced.
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.
Bad News: The spyware/trojan horse functionality has been even more deeply integrated into the operating system. There are more systems than ever whose performance has been negatively affected by these assaults on the user.
At least there's some good news...
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Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Informative)
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx [technet.com]
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Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
b) They can't look at what GPL'd software did without risking "contaminating" the source code and having to open it, so they can't "get inspiration" from GPL'd stuff. They may be able to gank code from some other more permissive licenses. I'm not positive but isn't the linux NTFS stuff GPL?
c) Smart ass comments might be justified based on what you said if those smart ass comments were at all related
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, as long as you're copying less than around 16384 files... [slashdot.org]
Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue... (Score:4, Insightful)
By now we should have correct, complete and RESUMABLE file and directory copies regardless of the source and target directories. It can be done. Just check out Robocopy. In fact Robocopy and RobocopyGUI are still the only good ways supported by Microsoft of copying large directories or whole drives within Windows in an environment where a crash is possible. (Don't even get me started on Synctoy crashes).
Why can't an end user just let the OS know they want these directories copied to here? Why do you still have to set up one copy at a time from a GUI? I can batch a copy, but I can't add to it when it's already started, and if I want proper control and logging I have to do it from the command line with a list of switches.
Who cares if they can get security working etc. if they can't even get the basic functionality right!?
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In other news... (Score:3, Interesting)
... 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.
Real-world sp1 performance (Score:5, Informative)
"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 [microsoft.com]
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Thats exactly what vista does. Its called SuperFetch, and it works out patterns of disk usage to try and pre-fetch stuff into the disk cache. Apparently its smart enough to recognise different patterns of applica
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
9% cpopy speed-up noticable? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:9% cpopy speed-up noticable? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, the slow copying speed when copying LARGE amounts of data sucks, but the WORST part of Vista is the slow copying speed when copying/moving small files. I mean, moving a file to the Recycle Bin takes 2 seconds! Copying a shortcut from one folder to another on the same drive takes 2 seconds! Those things should happen instantly, and DID happen instantly on XP, and every version of Windows before that.
That's where the performance problems really piss people off. A %9 improvement doesn't do squat.
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No stopwatch required (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
You techies take the fall... (Score:5, Funny)
Ahahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was using nLite a while back, built a custom install of XP with driver support for my hardware. It installs significantly faster than a standard XP disc, due to the extraneous components being removed, and lets me get down to business mucho grande faster in the event of a reinstall.
I played around to see how far I could take it, I could get xp bootable on some fairly low end machines once it was
Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a very interesting read.
Re:Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements (Score:5, Insightful)
In Vista they changed this so the dialog actually closed when the copy was complete, but now in SP1 they have gone back to the previous setup.
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This is actually a pretty common thing: the user gets used to reading the "broken" interface and then you go and fix it to the "right" interface, then the user comes back and complains that the "broken" one was better without understanding what the issues are.
Sure, the choice of solution could be better, but I'm not sure it's a battle they could have won. XP effectively is lying about file copies. So any correct copy implementation will probably be scoffed at in terms of (fake) performance.
The only rig
Re:Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements (Score:5, Informative)
As Mark said, there were several problems with the XP model. The biggest problem being that large file copy operations could use up all the memory in the system. There were also scenarios where there as double-caching going on.
In Vista RTM, they completely did away with most cached i/o and increased the read/write sizes. This resulted in both a real and a perceived performance penalty for some local copy scenarios, but it dramatically improved network throughput and utilization.
In Vista SP1, they went back to doing *some* cached i/o in certain scenarios. So it's basically a blended approach. They also eliminated the double caching that sometimes took place.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a very interesting read.
It is, but let me summarize it for a sad realization:
"In XP, we just issued 64kb read/writes via the standard API-s and used Cache Manager.
In Vista, a team saw a problem than no one before saw, and wrote a dedicated, big, complex engine, the File Copy Engine (tm) that, among other
O RLY? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, whew! That's a relief. I seriously thought that sentence was going to end with "face".
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Exhaustive testing (Score:4, Insightful)
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!)
Re:Exhaustive testing (Score:4, Insightful)
We're sorry. We screwed up. Reverted to the previous code. Better now. Steve, where is my brown paper bag?
Now what is the FUD here exactly. I really doubt file copying should deserve such a lengthy article.
ps. I'd rather they implemented some sane error handling in Explorers copy function, so it doesn't crap out at the first read only file. This is the reason I use the Windows port of Midnight Commander to copy/move directories on Windows. Did they fix THAT in Vista?
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But it hasn't fixed DVD Maker (Score:5, Interesting)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
No, no fat ladies for me
I don't want to start a holy war here but... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Vista versus XP (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:I don't want to start a holy war here but... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at your task manager for some process hugging everything. Especially if you used WMP sometime during the session. Its uncommon, and Ive only seen it happen once out of many
Vista already pulled from multicore boxen (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
FILE Copying? Am I in the 80's? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)
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...
Mind blowing 5.7MB/s file copy speed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
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