What Vista SP1 Means To You

An anonymous reader writes "Geek.com has an interview with Nick White, Microsoft's Vista Product Manager, covering the upcoming release of Vista SP1. The interview goes over some of the new features, how the change will affect admins, and how Microsoft decides if a change should be rolled out as an update or as part of the service pack. One of the most interesting questions asks whether people should feel that they have to wait until SP1 to upgrade to the operating system, a common practice with Windows users. White writes off this practice as no longer being necessary and notes how Windows Update has lessened the importance of the release of a service pack. Just the same, a News.com article explores the possibility that this update will finally begin driving users to Vista."

Two SP1 stories in one day?

[Arathon]

This seems semi-ridiculous.

But I'll say the same thing here that I did last time. Basically, the reason that SP1 isn't as big as deal as a "Service Pack" normally is, is that the two "main" updates that will provide a different end-user experience have already been released [arstechnica.com].

The main "other" thing that SP1 will offer, which apparently wasn't confirmed by Nick White's post, is Paul Thurrott's statement (echoed by others, but which he has now stepped back from until he can get confirmation [winsupersite.com]) that Vista SP1 will include a kernel update to 6.1 [winsupersite.com]. This would be the same kernel that will be in Windows Server 2008.

Re:What this means is that M$ is begging again.

[jeffasselin]

Twitter, sometimes you talk sense, sometimes you sound like some kind of fundamentalist nutjob. This post made sense and was informative for people not following up on the last news.

But people would take your posts a lot more seriously if you spelled Microsoft or its shorthand version MS properly. I don't like them myself, but there's no need for infantile name-throwing.

Re-installed Ubuntu instead. My Vista problems:

[Scot Seese]

I read this with a twinge of curiosity. Vista Home Ultimate came on the new Dell system I received a couple months ago. While the novelty of Vista's graphical enhancements wore off quickly, my irritation at a litany of Vista bugs did not. They include:

  - Two year old Netgear 802.11g wireless card being virtually impossible to install
  - Crackling, popping audio in World of Warcraft (and other games) from the built in audio that defied repeated attempts to fix via driver upgrades
  --- Disabled said audio in BIOS, inserted Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 digital PCI card. Guess what? VISTA INCOMPATIBLE. Creative. THE standard. in.com.patible with Vista's DRM-heavy digital device list. Back to crackling, popping on board audio. So annoying I resorted to playing WoW with no sound.
  - ATI HDTv Wonder PCI card installation - wasted time. Windows Media Center could not tune ANYTHING with any degree of quality when the same card + antenna did brilliantly on my old Win XP box. Furthermore, exhaustive forum searching reveals that Media Center actually cripples the driver for the HD tuner, making it so that you can tune OTA content, OR CATV content, but NOT BOTH. You have to install a hacked up driver from some shady 3rd party website to use the full functionality of your TV card. Again, the ATI product does not appear on Microsoft's DRM-heavy "approved digital device" list.
  - On board gigabit ethernet adapter's network configuration would randomly disappear and have to be reconfigured when the computer was hard rebooted for any reason, including power outages, or video lockups, leading us to..
  - NVidia GForce 7300 PCI Express card included with machine worked flawlessly as delivered, BUT after Microsofts last "patch Tuesday" a few weeks ago, the video would not 'wake up' after the machine had been put to sleep. The "sleep mode" suspend worked great until the last security patch.. It makes no sense to me either. After the patch, the video would not wake with the rest of the system, forcing a hard poweroff/restart, causing the network setting to disappear.. HALF the time.
  -

  So, two nights ago, after backing up, I took my freshly burned Ubuntu 7.04 cd, took a deep breath, and installed. I can get around in Linux, but I am by no means an expert. My installation was smooth. In less than 90 minutes, using Automatix, I had every plugin, driver, and application I could ever want to make my system perform properly. Nvidia OpenGL driver automatically configured, all video/flash plugins for Firefox, DVD playback, the whole 9 yards. Additionally, using the step-by step copy and paste instructions from the ubuntu website, I had Wine installed, and had configured it properly to run World of Warcraft.

    So here I sit. World of Warcraft runs smoothly. Audio is CRYSTAL CLEAR, my Soundblaster Live 5.1 card is supported, no popping, clicking audio. I play the game at 1680x1050 with almost all detail settings turned on at a very smooth framerate. I visit CNN.com and view all embedded video seamlessly, no plugin errors or other irritants. When I need to type papers for college, I have OpenOffice. Ipod works flawlessly with podcast management program.

Why do I need Vista again?

------

Make World of Warcraft work flawlessy in Ubuntu with Wine:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft [ubuntu.com]

PC World's noob-friendly "Seven Post-Install Tips for Unbuntu 7.04" :
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130923-page,1-c, linux/article.html [pcworld.com]

Re:What Vista SP1 Means to You

[westlake]

People that have been using Windows have been pretty happy with XP and Win2000. Surprising numbers of casual users still have '98. And increasing numbers of us are using something else entirely =)

In round numbers, this is how the world looks to the web developer:

Win XP 75%
Unchanged since September 06

W2K 6%
Down 5% since September 06.
W2K had little mass market exposure.

Vista 4%
Up from 0% in January 07
It should be interesting to see how Vista fares in Back-To-School and Christmas sales. You will be much less of the warmed-over XP box and much more of the DX10 system realistically spec'd for Vista. To speak of Vista's "failure" in the marketplace is desperately premature, if not inane.

OSX 4%
Unchanged since January 05

Linux 3%
Unchanged since November 03
However, the w3Schools stats suggest that Linux may be losing ground to the Mac and OSX.

W98 1%
Unchanged since August 06 OS Platform Statistics [w3schools.com]

Re:It means "XP" to me

[Joe The Dragon]

vista is better at 64 bit then xp is good luck finding drivers all of your hardware for xp 64bit.

Re:What Vista SP1 Means to You

[c.r.o.c.o]

I understand you're talking about round numbers, but Linux went from 2.6% to 3.4% since Nov 2003 and Mac went from 2.8% to 4% since Jan 2005. True, they are very small increases, however a good web developer cannot simply ignore 7.4% of their market. And I think the statistics you're quoting are not very relevant, because the browser dictates how the computer interacts with a site, not the OS.

On the same site I found these statistics: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp [w3schools.com]

The browser market is FAR more fragmented than the OS one, with every IE version and FF pretty much tied.

Re:What this means is that M$ is begging again.

[TheUnFounded]

Install Vista on a laptop. Then try:

1. saving a wireless connection with no SSID;
2. hibernating;
3. coming back from hibernation;
4. re-establishing a wireless connection AFTER coming back from hibernation (assuming you managed to get that far);
5. checking your battery consumption
6. ???

and then tell me there's nothing to complain about.

So use TrueCrypt

[BiggerIsBetter]

Runs on Linux and Windows, and doesn't need a TPM chip to operate. It'll create encrypted volumes from files, or work with raw devices, and also do "hidden volumes" in case you need plausible deniability - http://www.truecrypt.org/ [truecrypt.org]

Re:Re-installed Ubuntu instead. My Vista problems:

[W2k]

Each one of the issues you list are with drivers. In contrast, every piece of hardware in my system was supported out of the box. Was I just lucky? Maybe. But blaming Microsoft for poor third-party drivers is like blaming Linus Torvalds for security holes in Firefox on Linux.