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.'"

40 second boot time an improvement?

[iamacat]

With modern technology and many billions of dollars in development costs, you would think someone would figure out to save an image of a just booted system and only rebuild it when configuration changes. Granted, the restored image will need to reopen files, restore network connections and deal with changed removable devices. But that's where those billions of dollars come in...

SP or New OS?

[nbannerman]

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?

But will it increase sales of Vista?

[usul294]

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.

Too late

[dbolger]

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 Installed..

[ynososiduts]

I installed Vista just to test it out to see what was so bad. The first thing that struck me was that the boot times are so long, and my HDD activity LED is blinking constantly. I have a high end PC too*. What really blows my mind is how long it took to develop this POS. A 20 second improvement wouldn't be much of an improvement. With my specs and good programming it should boot IN 20 seconds.

* Core 2 Duo E6750 at 3.2 Ghz, 2 320 GB Segate Baracuda SATA II HDDs, 2 GB of Crucial DDR2 800 at 1xxx Mhz (forgot exacts), P35 Gigabyte DS3, and a Nvidia 8800 GTS.

90 seconds considered good?

[antifoidulus]

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:SP or New OS?

[jacksonj04]

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 OS-slating aside, the 7GiB is probably only used for the RC because it won't have its backup sequence optimised. Service Packs back up everything they're changing before writing, so they can recover the system if broken mid-flow. 7GiB is probably the entirety of every folder which may be changed, as opposed to the release which will have a much more narrowed down set of things to copy. XPSP2 needed far more space available than it actually took up, and also took 30 to 60 minutes on most machines. A lot of that was taken up with making a backup and verifying the installation - so if you don't mind running the risk of hosing your system (Insert joke about Windows being pre-hosed) then I'm sure it could be made a lot slimmer and faster.

Re:Times

[Anonymous Coward]

Between Mythbusters and computer rags, the number of people getting paid to "test" things without even using the basic techniques learned in high school science is amazing. Is it so hard to do a few trials, and report results with the appropriate number of significant figures?

I also love how they tested file copying speed...from a SD card, the fastest of which are still about 1/4 of the speed of your average hard drive.

Re:40 second boot time an improvement?

[pdusen]

They must be using goofy hardware. Vista never takes more than 45 seconds for me to boot, unless you count the 15 seconds in which I have Grub sitting up beforehand.

When will MS adopt a security-roll-up model?

[davidwr]

MS sometimes releases security roll-ups between service packs or after the final service pack, but they really should do this every quarter if not every month.

A security roll-up should be nothing more than all of the security patches since the last service pack, minus those that have been superceded, recalled, or otherwise outdated, and minus those that are very recent and not yet "proven in the field." In practice, this means everything more than 30-60 days old minus those that had problems or which were later updated.

This would make it a lot easier to rebuild a machine safely:
1. Download the latest service pack and security roll-up.
2. Create a slipstream CD and install it OR install your computer using the original CD and apply the service pack and security roll-up.
3. Lock down your firewall and hope there are no bugs in the firewall.
4. Connect to the network and run Windows Update.

Compare this to the current technique:
1. Download the latest service pack.
2. Create a slipstream CD and install it OR install your computer using the original CD and apply the service pack.
3. Lock down your firewall and hope there are no bugs in the firewall.
Connect to the network and run Windows Update.
4. Connect to the network and run Windows Update.

Compare step 3: The current technique relies a lot more on "hope there are no bugs in the firewall" than if you could easily install a security roll-up before connecting the machine to the network, particularly for the home or small-business user.

Same shit, different kernel

[gerrysteele]

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.

Re:But will it increase sales of Vista?

[billcopc]

First let me correct your typo: "Vista is a fairly big shit" ... there, much better!

It's great that you like Vista, I know quite a few people who do. I personally don't, for the simple reason that Vista is another step in the wrong direction in my opinion.

Maybe I'm missing something, despite the fact that I'm a system developer and hardware nut, but it seems to me like Windows is a GUI with a bunch of garbage tacked on. The GUI itself is alright, it's all the other junk that gets in the way while accomplishing very little. All I ever see is a lackluster file manager glued onto a very basic, featureless icon-based desktop, with the very stiff Start Menu and task bar. Aside from a few APIs for sound, graphics, networking and various other hardware interfaces, everything else seems extraneous. I don't mind the IE browser, because it's a convenient way for me to download Firefox on the first boot.

What is it that eats up 7gb of disk space and 2 minutes of boot time in Vista ? Old DOS games from a decade ago had flashy graphics not unlike the Aero Glass effects, so what's the big deal ? What's going on under that hood that I can't see or use, yet requires so much power and hardware ?

I'm going to stick my neck out, and say that Windows hasn't evolved since 95. Sure, they changed the underlying architecture, got rid of DOS and a whole bunch of other things most people never noticed (except us techies), but the interface has stayed 99% the same. It works the same, does pretty much the same job, so what true reason does anyone have to upgrade ?

Until someone comes up with a revolutionary interface that actually helps me work more efficiently, I'm going to resist these forced upgrades. I don't build monster PCs for the "privilege" of running Vista, I build them because help me get my work done quicker. Right now, Vista just wastes my time. I don't even run a regular XP install, I strip all the crap out beforehand using NLite. If I could run just the naked NT kernel with my own file manager and desktop, I'd be quite content, because I hardly use any of the bundled apps, save for Calc.exe! Not even notepad!

1 minute, 51 seconds?

[Trogre]

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]

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.

Different security model

[tknd]

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. That's because there's a conflict of interest: people coming from windows XP expect to be admins and have complete control of their computer but people from the nix world see it as you should never run as admin and if you do only do so for the task needed (sudo). So now the default vista setup puts people into a weird admin mode where everytime you want to do something that actually requires admin rights, UAC pops up. You can actually configure vista closer to the unix style where everyone runs as a normal user and anytime admin privileges are required, they need to type in the admin password. I like this a lot better because now when friends/family ask for computer help I can configure their vista computers closer to a unix model and prevent them from screwing over their system.

Re:Typical OS timeline

[suv4x4]

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.

As you know, it was released early due to pressure from corporations with running out Software Assurance subscription (they got nothing for, because of the delays).

Running a big company like Microsoft is like running a big country, and in your politics there are always compromises.

If it wasn't for dropping shares and the SA-s, Microsoft would've just put out XP SP3 year ago and release Vista sometime 2008-2009, much more refined.

Re:Windows XP SP3 please

[JebusIsLord]

Okay, fair enough. I was referring to consumer operating systems, not server installations. I'm sure IBM is still supporting installations from the 80s.

For reference, MS offers 10 years of support for business and server products.

For consumer OSes, I don't think MS can be beat support-wise. Certainly they shouldn't be criticised on this front. There is plenty of valid stuff to pick on them for, but legacy support isn't one of them.

Re:But will it increase sales of Vista?

[RubberDogBone]

It's not whether people understand GUIs or that there are others or like or dislike one or another. Most of them don't care about GUIs.

They just want their computer to DO what they want. Surf the web, look at pictures of the grandkids, play some games, maybe type a letter.

You don't need Vista to do those things. XP is good enough and people who don't know about GUIs still know how to use it. Vista changed a lot of things for the sake of change and even more so with the latest Office redo. Tell these end users what Vista or Office now does better all you want -but they won't care. They just want to surf the web, type their letters, get work done. The task is more important than how it gets done.

Many of those people are finding that things are suddenly harder to do or unfamiliar or different for reasons that don't directly benefit them.

MS is caught in a trap of their own making: XP and Office 2003 are "good enough" for most people doing most things. But being the same as the last version doesn't sell new boxes of software or make stockholders happy, so there have to be new versions with lots of different stuff crammed in to justify 200/400/600 bucks a copy.

But many end users don't think there was anything wrong with the old one. They just want to do their work. They aren't interested in upgrading for fun or to try something new.

Re:still way behind xp

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were buying a new computer would you prefer vista ready PC or leopard ready Mac?

This is the question Apple wants people to ask themselves. And, IMHO, that will be Mr. Jobs biggest failure when history looks back at him.

MS doesn't need a hardware tie-in, why does Apple? I see how hardware tie-in might have been a good argument 5 or 10 (or 25) years ago... But now that they have a great OS (which is easily portable), top-notch hardware, and an incredible marketing engine; why aren't they trying to sell their OS (and productivity suite, etc) to non-Apple hardware users? Worst case scenario, they will get loyalty purchases of hardware later on from OS X devotees.

I think this is a huge loss of revenue for Apple. I know I'd run Leopard if I could get it on a (less expensive) Dell.

Re:Yes, but...

[baldass_newbie]

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.

Re:Wow

[danielk1982]

>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.)

ideas

[rice_burners_suck]

I am of the opinion that they really dropped the ball with this Vista thing and even if they fix a lot of the problems in this service pack, it won't really help their position by much. I mean, look, XP did just about everything that businesses needed an operating system to do. If MS had spent the last several years improving XP, ironing out the bugs, perhaps rewriting a few modules that really needed to be re-engineered, fixing security flaws, optimizing the system, getting rid of some bloat or otherwise reducing the footprint of the OS, and just basically making small incremental improvements, and releasing them often, then I really think that XP would be a real winner by now. Just think, if every six months, say, they had released a new service pack for XP, then XP would be at service pack 10 by now. They could have made small transitions, allowing all the other companies in the industry time to catch up, to fix whatever issues might prevent a certain application or another one from running, etc.

But instead, let's take a look at what they did.

They hyped up how amazing the next version would be for an incredibly long amount of time. A database file system; integrated search; an amazing new interface; there were all kinds of innovations that were supposed to get released with Vista. But then reality set in and it was realized that even for a behemoth the likes of MS, it isn't just a simple task of banging out k-locs of code to achieve the kind of incredible product that they were shooting for, and to do it from scratch. If they had simply continued with the XP codebase, adding instant search as a service pack, adding the database file system as another service pack... or better yet, instead of service packs, if they could have modeled these things as modules of some sort that could be installed optionally in a system, then they could release them independently of other features, and an OS release would be unaffected by delays in those other modules. The result of the way they worked was delays, delays, delays, and I really feel that at some point, they took what they had, packaged it up as best they could, called it the final product, and shipped it, just to say that they had something. This is a shame, since all along, they had XP, which, if you clean it up using some utilities you can download for free, and if you uninstall a lot of the bloat, switch to the classic interface, turn off all the animations (or in system preferences, tell it to optimize for best performance, rather than best appearance), well, if you do all those things and make sure that Windows NEVER accesses the Internet except through a firewall (a Linksys box suffices for most purposes), and if you make sure the system doesn't pick up spam, spyware, adware, popups, and all kinds of other crap that attacks Windows (which is achievable by keeping a backup of your system with exactly the configuration you want, and keeping the OS on one partition and your data on another, so that you can simply plop the backup right into the OS partition when something goes haywire), well, if you do all those things, then XP was actually a very good OS. I know, I hate to say it. But yes, it did everything an OS is supposed to do: It booted the computer; it provided facilities to run other programs; and it allowed those programs to use the shared resources of the computer. It also provided many services on top of that that could serve to enhance the computer's usefulness. Now you can argue that it's bloated, that it's slow, that it's prone to security problems, that many many things are wrong with it, and you're right as far as I'm concerned. But the fact is that once an IT department figures out how to get control of this beast, it will do pretty much whatever you want. So I went off on a tangent but the point was that MS already had in XP a perfectly good platform for adding features and even, yes, gaining more control of other markets, which is what they always like to do. They sort of dumped this out the window and went for the next big thing.

Re:Vista Supporters' Rebuttals

[neminem]

No, the majority of us, I'm guessing, will say: "XP".

Linux does things much better than Windows in a lot of ways, but it's still not quite ready to become the standard personal (as opposed to server) OS. XP isn't perfect, either, but it's decent, and it generally just works, which is something I can say about neither Linux nor Vista.

Re:Yes, but...

[Tom]

UAC is basically SEWindows,

Ouch, that hurt.

Sorry, but I know quite a lot about SELinux. And UAC is not even in the same league, it's not even the same sports, so to speak. UAC is an ugly crutch to shove responsibility on the user and ask him questions 95% don't even understand completely. More importantly, AFAIK the technical backend is vastly different and UAC can not ever hope to become an equivalent.

But yes, security and convenience do not always marry happily. In that regard, they are alike.

Re:SP or New OS?

[Tony Hoyle]

Managed code tends to leak because the garbage collector only runs when it has time to do so - if you have a tight loop doing something you can leak hundreds of megabytes very quickly.

I saw a java app once that could do that (at a place I used to work) - they had converted the c++ core to java and the memory usage went from running fine on 512kb to burying a 4gb server.. we worked out that if you didn't call gc() regularly it just grew until most of the memory was in swap. c# may be a little more efficient (I sure hope it is) but it seems inherent in the design of garbage collected systems that they'll use gobs of memory to do stuff.