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Vista Service Pack One Almost Here
Zonk
on Mon Mar 17, 2008 02:38 AM
from the like-a-really-lame-christmas dept.
from the like-a-really-lame-christmas dept.
arogier writes "After numerous delays and an actual release reversal, the official release date for Vista service pack one has been set for Tuesday, March 18th on Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads. It will be released as an automatic update on April 18th. 'It's unclear so far how a February snafu will affect SP1's roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would "make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."' It would be a good time for those planning to adopt early to perform requisite backups and locate their restore media."
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Vista SP1 Release May Be Near 231 comments
Tokonamu sends a note about the release to a private testing group of a new build of Windows Vista SP1, possibly presaging the imminent release of the long-awaited service pack. Speculation about a Feb. 15 release date has been fueled by a report out of Taiwan, according to the article. Microsoft also issued a new build of Windows XP SP3 this week, but it's getting next to no publicity out of Redmond, what with XP being the main competition for Vista and all.
[+]
IT: Vista SP1 Released to Manufacturing 397 comments
Reverend Ninja writes "According to the Windows Vista team blog, Windows Vista SP1 has been released to manufacturing. It appears we'll have to wait until mid-March to play with it though, as the team cites that they want everyone to have a 'great install experience'. 'Service Pack 1 brings new improvements that are based on feedback we heard from our customers. It further improves the reliability and performance of Windows Vista. The information we collect thanks to tools like the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting help us learn about where and when customers are having issues with Windows Vista and the applications that run on it. Since these issues have a direct impact on our customers' experiences, we've invested time and energy to make this better. While Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is an important milestone, we will continue to invest in the continuous improvement process.'"
[+]
WGA Under Vista SP1 Is Kinder and Nags More 299 comments
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[+]
Vista SP1 Update Locks Out Some Users 410 comments
Echostorm writes with word that Windows Vista SP1, which began rolling out via Automatic Update, has left some users' machines unbootable. The update loops forever on "Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3 — 0% complete. Do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down"... restart and loop. Echostorm notes having found traces of what sounds like the same bug in early beta releases of SP1. It's unclear how many users are affected. So far there is no word on a fix from Microsoft.
[+]
Microsoft Pulls Vista SP1 Update 268 comments
1shooter writes "news.com reports that Microsoft is withdrawing SP1 for Vista. Nick White, Microsoft product manager blogged 'We've heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287,' wrote White. 'Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.'"
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Vista SP1 Is Even Less Compatible 278 comments
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Microsoft is now saying that Vista SP1 disables some 3rd party applications. The KB article on SP1 incompatibility states: 'For reliability reasons, Microsoft blocks these programs from starting after you install Windows Vista SP1.' It does link to several vendor support pages with updates or workarounds. Unfortunately, at least one of the suggestions consists of merely disabling part of the program, which could leave you with half an anti-virus solution."
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I got the, er, "early adopter" version. (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Updates? Ha! (Score:4, Informative)
I applied one of the updates (KB944533) and it killed http. Internet explorer would not open up web pages, but would give the "server could not be reached" error. I was able to ping just fine, and I could reach the page from another computer on the same network. The kicker was that the patch not only knocked out IE, but Firefox as well. Things worked fine after uninstalling the patch. Of course, the patch got re-installed the very next day.
Yesterday I decided to install some more patches, hoping that they would remedy the bug in KB944533. Nope! In fact, the DHCP client stopped working. I could no longer get anything but APIPA addresses. I uninstalled those patches, hoping to recover, but no dice. I decided to roll back the machine about two weeks, and now it blue screens.
Now Microsoft isn't the only culprit. A language pack update in Ubuntu is killing a number of my KDE apps (k3b in particular). So I have two machines that I have to run unpatched operating systems on, because patching them causes them to not work. At least I have a choice to ignore the patch with Ubuntu. Windows applies the patches without asking.
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Re:Updates? Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Updates? Ha! (Score:4, Informative)
On our small company LAN I encountered a similar problem but with a stock install of Vista on about 3 newly purchased laptops. The problem turned out to be the fact that our LAN uses a firewall/router and connects to ADSL which requires a lower MTU, and Vista has the MTU fixed at 1500. Lowering it to 1492 (manually - via the command line no less!) on the laptops made the difference.
Now, we could browse some sites but not others. The amazing thing was most of the Microsoft sites (like msn.com, Hotmail, etc.) wouldn't work but competing services would. Strange brew. :)
Parent
Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version. (Score:5, Funny)
It's more like ordering a meal, then complaining that they DID immediately bring you the uncooked ingredients, hoping that they'll have time to cook it for the people who order later.
-:sigma.SB
Parent
Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version. (Score:5, Funny)
Imagine if a car goes to a restaurant and having waited ages for it's meal is disappointed when the starter and main course arrive and are foul tasting and inadequate for a car of his appetite
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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1. Adobe Creative Suite install fails. Aparently not an uncommon problem. Finding a fix that works...far too long.
2. Internet Expoder crashes on start-up. Also not a unique issue. Fixed by full reinstall.
3. Blue screen of death (yes, it does exist!). Happens randomly while idle (twice so far).
4. Super slow copy to network folder from optical disk.
5. Enough random crashes when dealing with large files (no problem with similar hardware and XP, with less memory).
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Awesome!! (Score:2, Funny)
Moment of truth... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Moment of truth... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's faster (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, there's other unsung stuff in Vista i've not seen in any OS - the problem solutions centre (not sure exactly how to translate into English); when I got it I had my one and only BSOD in Vista. Shocked, I rebooted and as soon as I was back to the desktop Windows pops up a message saying "I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Click Yes, comes back saying "Ah I crashed because of this driver; there's a update to it here which will fix the problem". It's never happened since.
So yeah, there's reasons Vista is better. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied).
It's an upgrade without a doubt. I wouldn't pay specifically to upgrade mind you, but I appreciate the changes as they come anyway.
Parent
Re:It's faster (Score:4, Insightful)
As for UAC, I've put that into silent mode because it annoyed the hell out of me. I know it's meant to be obstructive. But I need to use a couple of legacy applications. The UAC blackout thingy actually wrecks havoc with multi screen setups and DirectDraw applications. Or at least, it did for me. It would have been nice if it didn't nag me every time I started an application which I pre-configured to be run in administrative mode. That would at least solve some of the problems I have with UAC.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
XP has something similar to the "problem solutions centre" as well. Like the other respondent, it usually doesn't have anything relevant, and just gives you a generic message like "such and such a driver crashed, go to the vendor's site and see if there's a newer one". I think it comes up as an option in the error reporting wizard, if you choose to send the error report.
Vista is much slower (Score:3, Insightful)
Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive.
Most likely, your old machine had accumulated crap over time, and resinstalling XP would have given an even larger speedup. Vista is far less responsive on my Thinkpad X61s than XP was on my Thinkpad X40, comparing them side by side. Only the cpu bound tasks like compiling are faster, due to the faster hardware.
"I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?".
Yeah, whenever my own programs crash I get that one. It doesn't find any solutions though, I still have to debug my own code.
It did once claim to have found a solution to system crash, pointing
Re:Vista is much slower (Score:5, Informative)
And all the palava about Areo grinding systems down is rubbish too; it's all 3d accelerated (read: using hardware features otherwise doing nowt), so that too has no effect of performance. Feels very snappy in fact, especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped.
There are some things i don't like about Vista of course; the dumbed down explorer for one, and the higher memory requirements for another, but it does load stuff faster than XP, no doubt.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Moment of truth... (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of those things that you really have to spend time with and adust too, because in actual fact, Vista really improved on this.
If you click on the 'location bar' or whatever its called, it shows you the current path, eg. c:\users\documents\whatver... and has a history drop down of the last several folders. I agree this is sort of lame. There is also a back/forward button which behaves as it would in a browser; and the back/forward buttons aren't all that bad.
But the real magic is when you have a folder/file in one of the lower panes (left or right) selected, then the location bar displayes a sort of breadcrumb view.
eg: [myname] > documents > whatever >
clicking on the myname / documents / whatever will take you directly to that folder. So that's our up button. Not only is there a button that goes 'up one level', but you can also usually go up 2 or 3 or more levels directly.
On top of that clicking on the '>' bring drop down lists of the folders within that folder... so if I'm in 'whatever', and I click the '>' next to 'myname' I get a list of the subfolders of myname... so without leaving where I am, with 2 clicks I can navigate directly to an 'uncle folder' (alternate child of the parent of the parent). You gotta admit that's pretty slick.
So we've got easy navigation up one, two, three, or even more levels, as well as directly into the children of any those levels.
Backspace no longer goes to the parent directory.
Its now: alt-uparrow
That's not so bad.
Frankly, compared to most file explorers I've used including Mac OSX's finder and Windows XP, Vista's is pretty good - once you take the time to learn its quirks and shortcuts.
it doesn't allow be to customize the layout and remove all useless elements. Like the favorite folders, I don't need it, just show be the directory tree.
Under [username]/favorites/links you can easily customize / remove any links you find useless, or replace them with ones you'd find useful (as I've done). Unfortunately if you remove all of them its not smart enough to suppress the section entirely; I imagine there's a registry hack for that, but really, in my case a link to documents, desktop, and a couple project folders is actually pretty useful are actually really useful, so I'm actually glad to have them there. And I got rid of the searches, music, and pictures crud.
I also needed to hack the registry just so that explorer will keep using list view for all explorer windows (dumb directory profiles).
Actually, there is a checkbox under Tools -> Folder Options -> Remember Each Folders View Settings
If you uncheck that, it pretty much disables the 'directory profiles' you are talking about, if I understood you right. You shouldn't need to 'hack the registry'.
But it all boils down to a single question: why would you exchange your XP for Vista?
So far I haven't found anything.
I think for most people that's a fair assessment. But when you buy new hardware, unless there is a specific compatibility reason to get XP I'd recommend vista over xp nearly any day.
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Re:No there's plenty (Score:5, Informative)
I'll ignore the fact that you are doing exactly what you accuse others by repeating hearsay and address the "it doesn't work on Linux either" remark. That would be valid if it ever did in the first place which it didn't. Let's compare apples to apples here. Vista's main competition isn't Linux or OS X even. It is XP. In that context, the program does work in XP and not in vista. It sure is a Vista issue. Say what you like, but that sounds like a Vista sale lost if that is the driving factor for switching for that user.
Umm....No! They were SOLD on the fact that the NEW machine they bought was "Vista capable" from the get-go when it wasn't. Hence the class action lawsuit. Bait and switch is still illegal in the US at least until the Microsoft lobbyists pay off, er, "contribute to" Congress to change it. There is a big difference between buying a new machine based on the word of the supplier that it will work fine with the new OS and buying an upgrade where it is anybody's guess. That is the difference here.
Parent
Re:No there's plenty (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, that's not quite right. I have a negative view about Vista because, having had to install it on a laptop so I can support some of my user base that have Vista, I have had:
1) The laptop screen saver not waking up *sometimes* and so I have to toggle the laptop in and out of standby to carry on working.
2) A wifi driver that blue screens *sometimes* on resuming from standby so if 1) happens I may lose my work in progress.
3) A damn stupid box that pops up every time I run notepad++ warning me about the program.
4) Mysterious periods of disk thrashing.
5) Mysterious periods of wifi not connecting.
6) A need to buy 1GB more RAM to make the thing stop plodding.
7) RDP sessions mysteriously failing and needing a registry key deleted to get things going again
Now, I am sure some of these things are fixable with some tweaking or with some patching, and perhaps the wifi issue is down to the chipset company, but the number of hoops my users I have had to go through to make simple things work is extraordinary and timewasting. Unlike XP (or 2000 or NT), rarely has Vista been an 'out of the box' solution to a new install.
I am very pragmatic when it comes to Vista, but quite simply if you put identical machines running Vista and XP side by side (OK, let's give Vista some more RAM to start) and use them both for a short while, my money's on Vista being more of a PITA to use and less easy to navigate: things that took a few clicks to get to are now buried and we have had to wait for revised or new beta versions of some apps just to get some things going. Some users were on Office 2002 - but Outlook has problems with that so we have had to pay to upgrade some, while others have been moved to a Scalix pilot system.
Sure, Vista is not a train wreck, but it's a bloody big detour on the road to efficient computing with many rough edges and a cost loading. I know it will get better over time, but when it hit the ground running it was still getting dressed and keeps tripping over its pants.
Parent
Re:Moment of truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
That was, they'll wait for SP1 to pass judgment. Not wait for SP1 then blindly buy.
Parent
Backup - but do backups work properly yet? (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow... (Score:3, Funny)
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I won't comment on the DRM because it really isn't as serious as a lot of Slashdotters think.
No comment. (Score:5, Insightful)
I won't respond to your comment, but DRM is BUILT-IN to the Operating System. How much more serious can it get?
Parent
Re:Somehow... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just want an accurate frame for your post, Mac troll or Linux user.
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... I can't help but pity those poor Vista users. What should be simply the release of a patch has become a major "event" which people actually have to prepare for and which, from what I hear, is even causing something quite similar to mild panic. But then again, you do get great DRM for your troubles.
I think you're reading Slashdot a bit too much. ;-)
Most people have no trouble with service pack upgrades, as they've been tested a long time before getting released.
Actually, I think Vista SP1 seem to have had a longer testing period than usual.
The DRM comment seems like a a non sequiteur; Vista SP1 includes no "great DRM" extras.
Actually, even Vista RTM makes the DRM thing entirely optional. Those with a brain will just boycott DRM media and avoid it altogether. Like me. Playing pirated HD video on my 5
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Ummm, were you off-world last month when enough people had trouble with Vista SP1 MS recalled it?
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Um, did you read the content of that link? It says exactly what I said, but with the addition of a poorly worded headline.
To quote the article (with some of my own emphasis added):
Microsoft has stopped automatically distributing a prerequisite piece of software for Vista Service Pack 1, following some customer complaints that it had caused system problems.
And, to quote my previous post (with similar emphasis):
A handful of people had a problem with a patch that happens to be a prerequisite to SP1, so Microsoft stopped releasing that patch via automatic update...
Ignore the headline. Read the article. Start with the first paragraph. It explains that, despite what the headline says, SP1 was not recalled. What was removed from automatic update, but still otherwise available, was KB937287 [microsoft.com]. SP1 itself wasn't actually publicly availa
Re:Somehow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Random stuff does not break. Look at the emergency patching and releasing of the kernel that all distros had to go through a while back to fix the VM splice bug.
All those distros managed to push a replacement kernel in a matter of hours/days that did not adversely affect user systems that I could tell.
Likewise, this patch of an operating system that you pay for ought to work as smoothly as the free one. I'm not really sure how comparable the two are, but it is interesting that the linux distros were able to pull a hot fix like that without too much user consternation.
Parent
Re:Somehow... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Infact there are few systems that would need a full restore, as long as you can get to a tty you can usually rollback any update you don't want (distros vary but it can be done in a debian system)
funny (Score:3, Funny)
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Rock and hard place. (Score:4, Interesting)
Second the poster higher up: it will sure be interested to see how many of the wait for SP1 adopters now follow through and adopt.
Given the general widely held feeling about the the superiority of XP over Vista I cannot see many people clamoring to do so. But on the flip argument MS will withdraw XP soon to try and force adoption of Vista - this would leave many potential customers between a brick and a hard place.
No bother to me - I've been linux only at home for ~8 years (so I guess I'm biased) - but we sure live in interesting times.
Vista slipstreamed with SP1 (Score:4, Informative)
File Name: en_windows_vista_with_service_pack_1_x86_dvd_x14-29594.iso
File Size: 2943MB
MD5: b09267740ddd1a08d80b04ec6bbc232a
SHA1: bcd715a02739809e477c726ae4b5caa914156429
So far, I've noticed a fast improvement with Disk IO performance with SP1. I think I'm going to take Vista for another spin now that it feels "faster". It's still a memory hog however. I'd recommend 2GB or 1GB at the very least.
Early Adopters Suffer. (Score:3)
Vista failage (Score:3, Informative)
Let me reiterate: I'm dragging one folder icon into a different folder. An operation which, for Mac or Linux, merely involves rewriting an inode. But for Windows Vista, a dialog box comes up which shows the computer recursively going through every file and directory in the folder I'm moving, as if a file or folder somehow needs its location updated independently of the folder it's in. Several minutes later, my drag has finished being processed.
I've heard that Vista SP1 improves file handling, so two weeks ago I obtained Vista Service Pack 1 through the MSDN membership at my workplace. But a few minutes into the install, it fails with error 0x8007000d and points me to a tech note which advises me to turn off antivirus (done), run a disk check (done), and then run 'sfc
I have a feeling, come tomorrow when Vista SP1 is released to the masses, there's going to be more headscratching than celebrating.
"...and locate their restore media." (Score:3, Informative)
Granted it does seem somewhat useful; I was able to roll back an instillation when a vpn client gave me a BSOD. However, what am I supposed to do if I CAN'T BOOT TO WINDOWS?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/03/10/vista-loader-20-oem-bios-emu-crack-softmod-update/ [mydigitallife.info]
I know it would be the Slashdot way to convince you to move to Linux instead, but fuck that - you wanna use Windows, this will help you continue to do so.
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Maybe you need to try a more conventional debian, and manually configure it. Its possible the autodetection just isn't having a fun time.
Conversely , kick back a bit and try it later. It could be a driver situation thats just-not-there-yet. Sometimes linux just takes a bit longer.
Good luck tho. Linux is worth it.
Now, as for vista. I'm *DAMN* hoping this service pack makes