Vista Service Pack 1 Is Out

superglaze writes "What's to say? After much prevaricating and slipping out then pulling back, the first service pack for Windows Vista has actually been released. It's available for download now via Microsoft's sites, with an auto-update rollout scheduled for next month, and it should hit Amazon's virtual shelves on Wednesday."

List of issues with Vista SP1

[atari2600]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=948343#method5 [microsoft.com]

Re:So how long do I wait?

[snl2587]

I would wait at least a month to make sure any major holes weren't opened up or major compatibility issues introduced. That should probably be enough.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the IT field, use Vista 100% on my laptop and have several clients.

I snagged SP1, the latest pre release build and it has been fine.

Things seem 'faster', copying files, something that use to take weeks now takes as long as it should.

I still get the random spoolsv crashing for no reason but that was there before SP1.

None of my applications break although I don't use anything custom or home grown or vertical.

The install took a while - three stages with I believe a few stages each. I made a backup of my data prior just in case it went blue. No problems with the install/patch.

captch: robbed

Another Microsoft Success

[stevedcc]

I tried the (two) public betas on my Vista Ultimate 64 partition. They all failed to install at 19%. I reported it on the forums, tried to send my logs to an email address they said they'd set up, and even identified which file was supposedly "corrupt" (the one it was installing actually).

For my trouble, I've been ignored, and I'm now going to have to reinstall the ENTIRE OS because some small part of it is supposedly corrupt (systems works fine) and they won't let me just fix that. Lovely. My Ubuntu install is so much better, I wish I didn't need the vista one.

I've been using it for a few weeks

[Coopjust]

I grabbed the X64 update from Microsoft's OEM website a few weeks ago.

First off, SP1 is a massive improvement. It installs a lot of bugfixes (including ones not released publicly before)... and it improves other stuff quite a bit. Disk performance is much better- you could argue that copy and paste tasks should not be slowed down by the speed of the OS, but it's improvement.

Overall, my Vista install rarely runs into errors- maybe one or two non-system apps are hanging a week. UAC got less annoying (it wasn't that bad to begin with).

It took an hour to install on my PC, and I didn't run into any issues. I think it helps Vista a lot. Honestly, I prefer Vista on newer machines; it's RAM heavy requiring 2GB+ to run well but RAM is very cheap nowadays and the x64 version works quite well; I had no driver issues personally.

(I still recommend backing up though. I always back up before a major update, whether it's XP, Vista, OS X or Ubuntu).

Slow install

[doodzed]

Do not start the update procedure unless you do not need your machine for a while. On stage 2 of 3 on a fairly beefy box(5.1 vista experience) and it has been chugging for about 15 min and shows 2% done.

At least my mac is up.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Shock Horror

[Toreo asesino]

I've been running it for a couple of weeks now, and yes, shock horror it does work just fine.

The system feels more responsive, and stuff happens as it should. This is the Vista that should've shipped, but where Vista has suffered Windows Server 2008 has gained; all the initial frustrations have been fixed in SP1 for Vista and Windows Server 2008, so consider Vista RTM a beta kernel for Win2k8. It is after all, the server market Windows isn't 95% prevalent in after all.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[xstonedogx]

Where does the GP say "stellar performance" and who is "everyone else"?

SP1 installed very easily for me. Everything the GP says agrees with my own experience, except for the spoolsv crashing. The only issue I had at all was having to change the screen resolution back. As an added bonus, Bioshock now runs without crashing every 5-10 minutes.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[Anonymous Coward]

SP1 RTM has been available for quite some time from the technet site. We've been using it for quite awhile now. BTW, the spoolsv issue is with an HP Print driver, generally from a print server. You need to get an updated hpbmini.dll - minor rev 16 and greater will work. Older versions don't understand an OS that starts with version "6" and just crash the spooler. You can delete the driver using printmanagement.msc.

Re:So how long do I wait?

[cyclocommuter]

If your reason for installing is only for performance, Vista SP1 will probably disappoint you. On the other hand I have installed it on 2 laptops and one desktop and the only problem I had was with an HP Printer driver that stopped working. All I had to do was to go to Control Panel, remove the printer, then add the printer back again and that fixed the problem.

Honestly, I did not find any major improvement performance-wise nor stability-wise as my machines were already running relatively smoothly pre-SP1. There appears to be minor improvements in boot times, shutdown times (though I do this maybe once a week per PC/laptop on average); plus getting in and out of sleep, especially for the laptops, appears to go smoother.

Re:So how long do I wait?

[AJWM]

But the beta process is there to eliminate the brave earlier adopter problems

No, see, that's what an alpha release is for. Beta releases are supposed to be damned near final, what in these days of release grade inflation is now called a "release candidate". This is why "/.'ers like to discount MS's beta process as a bunch of rubbish"; because for those of us that remember, it is.

"And traditionally it has worked as an alpha process"

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[Two9A]

Before anyone gets all riled up on this, it's a repost of a repost of an old troll. I can't find the original or the repost right now, but this text is exactly the same, right down to the use of "486/66".

At least take the time to update your trolls, son.

Re:Service Pack 1... Not impressed so far.

[atari2600]

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3221 [microsoft.com] states that End of Life (extended support retirement) for Windows XP is (in) 2014.

Re:I've been using it for a few weeks

[Anarke_Incarnate]

I don't believe the parent was talking about a technological generation, but rather a genealogical one. Those are 20yrs, so in fact, in LESS than a generation we have gone from 8MB to 2GB.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[CannonballHead]

Benchmark? I'd imagine it's a fairly long ordeal to really and accurately benchmark file copying, unless you want "It took about 3 seconds to..." Plus, you'd have to have a non-SP1 computer that has exactly the same hard drive fragmentation and everything... it's not like you're benchmarking a game with GameSpot and have x amount of computers to spare for exactly that purpose...

Vista: It doesn't have to be painful...

[ndykman]

I've been running Vista for about 16 months now. (Got it from MSDN, etc.). I ran both 32bit and 64bit editions, on two kinds of hardware. It's been a bumpy ride sometimes.

If at all possible, use the x64 edition. Yes, some OEM make this a pain, but try. Given this, my next suggestion seems obvious. Get more memory. The more, the better. I'd rather have 8G of DDR2-533 than 2G of DDR3 uber-awesome overclocked OMGBBQ ram, because caching works. If on an Intel integrated graphics, turn down some of the Aero stuff. Duh. If possible, just buy a cheap 8400GS, because even that will help.

SP1 helps. Some things are faster. Of course, I'm not seeing some of the problems others are. I recently shipped some ISOs over from machine to my server (Win 2008), and it just flew. Got about 600Mb over a 1Gb switched link.

All in all. Not one blue screen on the desktop, a couple on the laptop due a older bluetooth driver. Things seem plenty responsive and fast, but there is a breaking in period. Sure, it isn't "awesome", but ME it sure is not.

Be patient! Indexing and the prefetching stuff takes time, but it does work. I use Outlook (okay, I know, I know) a lot, and it fired up faster and faster after the first day or two.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[HeavyAl]

I use Vista on my Dell laptop since getting Linux to sleep and recover is still too spotty for my tastes but so far this is my experience with SP1:

• Started Install at 2:04 PM PST
• grind, grind grind
• Finished at 2:32 PM PST
• Process list reports dwm.exe (the 'window manager') is using ~27 megs rather than the 33 it was using previously
• Shutdown/Reboot time has diminished by around 5 seconds .. nothing to write home about as I don't reboot often anyway
• Switching between wired/wireless seems to pick up the networks faster and with less fiddling - previously Vista had trouble at times switching between the two and I would have to run their diagnostic tool to reset the ip
• There is a 'screen flash' present at login that was not previously apparent. Could just be a matter of waiting til everything settles down and might just need a defrag after all those files were updated
• Yep, O&O defrag reports the system went from 1.3% fragmented before the upgrade to about 8% fragmentation after

Overall, I don't 'feel' much of a difference. I copied a couple 1 gig isos across my network and the speed was fairly similar to what it was before - the calculation time was less, but the actual copy was almost the same but that could be due to other loads on this network right now (no, I'm not going to qualify that).

I cant say for certain but it looks like there might be one or two more services installed now that werent there before. Have to do a bit more research on that but contrary to what others have said this update does not appear to have re-enabled services that I previously had turned off such as windows search.

It will be interesting to see what other reports we get on this as it gets pushed out to the main stream users next month.

Re:So how long do I wait?

[nmg196]

It doesn't need 2GB of RAM. It runs fine with 1GB of RAM. People who don't know how Vista works simply assume it needs 2GB because they notice that if you give it 2GB it uses it all. They fail to notice that if you give it 4GB it also uses it all. For some reason, people put lots of RAM in their computer and then hope that all the new RAM will remain free. Vista chooses to use it to speed up your system (mainly by caching). If you have a problem with that, use a less clever OS like Windows XP.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[tixxit]

Vista's file copying, w/o SP1, was so incredibly slow, you really don't need a benchmark to notice its faster either. Copying just seems like its taking a normal amount of time, as opposed to way fucking longer than it ever should.

Re:Auto upbreak.

[MufasaZX]

Luckily today was a slow day at work so I did various benchmark tests both before and after installing SP1. This was all done on my Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop, Core 2 Duo 2Ghz CPU, 2GB RAM, and a freshly defragmented 200GB 7200RPM Seagate HD. Not a mobile Lan Party screamer, but it gets the job done well enough.

Boot times dropped, both with and without ReadyBoost enabled (using a 4GB 150x SD card) by about 10 seconds, ending up with 1:56 clean and 1:45 with ReadyBoost.

ATTO Disk Benchmark showed a . [zfilms.org]

Copying 1GB of JPG files from one partition to another dropped from 1:31 to 1:09, and to the network from 1:35 to 1:06.

3DMark06 scores very slightly increased, PCBench05 scores slightly decreased.

The graphics test in CoH OF went from 59.7/28.8/7.9 up to 59.7/28.9/9.2

So no huge improvements, but overall things are just a bit more snappy.