 |
|
| Author |
MSFT Windows Vista Service Pack Replies |
HenryTo
Site Admin
Joined: 06 Aug 2004
Posts: 7642
Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
|
 Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2008 12:10 am Post subject: |
 |
|
One of the first reviews of Vista SP1. This is a must-read:
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3233
| Quote: | There is a saying among software development circles that businesses as a whole won’t touch a Microsoft product until the first service pack; they would prefer to wait until a product has been widely used and the biggest problems identified & solved. It’s cold but effective logic that also puts a great deal of pressure on Microsoft. No matter how good (or bad) a product is, half of their customers won’t bat an eye until there’s a service pack, making the first such pack just as important as the product launch itself in some ways. Complicating matters further with the Vista launch in particular is that Microsoft has tied Windows Server 2008 to the Vista kernel; getting Windows Server 2008 out the door means any and all Vista problems that would hinder server operation need to be eliminated. The result is that Service Pack 1 is a big deal for Microsoft, they need to show consumers that they can fix what still ails the OS, they need to show businesses that it’s now ready for them to use, and they need to show server administrators that the core technology is so good that a reliable server can be built off of it.
Furthermore, with the progression of technology in the last year the timing couldn’t be any more critical. The 4GB address space barrier for 32bit x86 is finally beginning to rear its head with more average computer uses; RAM prices have nosedived with 8GB of RAM going for as little as $160, resulting in a wide and very real need for a 64-bit operating system (and XP64 being a poor fit for consumers). Meanwhile PC OEMs are finally warming up to the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and are ready to start building systems with it, meaning they too must move beyond XP. Even governments are finding they need to move to Vista as of late, as new encryption standards come in to play which only Vista supports.
The result of this is that many different groups have been watching SP1 far more intently than past service packs. With the final version of SP1 in hand, today we’ll be looking at what Microsoft is bringing to the table with Vista’s first service pack. With a combination of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements, there’s a great deal to this service pack that we’ll be covering so let’s get started.
.....
Observations & Closing Thoughts
As far as the user experience is concerned with Vista, it is in our experience that users shouldn’t expect any significant changes, in this respect Vista SP1 is much more like any other Windows service pack, rather than being another XP SP2. To that extent if you threw a pre-SP1 system and a post-SP1 system in front of us, we’d need to do some testing to identify which one was using SP1, in day-to-day use the difference is not obvious outside of the specific improvements we’ve talked about earlier.
For those of you curious how long the SP1 installation process will take, Microsoft has said it will take anywhere between 20 minutes and over an hour. Some of this boils down to simple hard drive performance with slower drives taking longer to update all of the files SP1 patches, but given our own installation efforts we suspect that there are other factors that are non-obvious. In other words, your mileage may vary. In general Vista x64 will take longer to patch than Vista x32 due to the additional files that need to be patched under Vista x64 (due to the number of files and libraries that come in 32bit and 64bit versions). On our official test system we clocked Vista x64 taking 33.5 minutes to install from start to finish, while a laptop took just shy of an hour. You’ll definitely want to go find something else to do for a bit while Vista is patching.
One thing that is unfortunate for Microsoft with SP1 is that there is a good chance that system performance immediately following the patching process will be lower than it was prior to patching. As part of the installation process the SuperFetch and ReadyBoost subsystems are purged of all caches and learned behaviors, effectively reverting a patched system to that of a brand-new untrained system. Vista does not take long to retrain itself with Microsoft noting the process can take a couple of days (we were back to perceived normal within a day), but never the less a lot of people are going to be thrown off by things such as longer application load times immediately following the patch.
Finally, coming in to SP1 we have heard some concerns about application and driver compatibility. While we cannot test everything, we have not run in to any new issues with SP1. We have heard within the last day that a small number of systems are having an issue with one of the SP1 pre-patches (patches that are required prior to installing SP1) causing an infinite reboot sequence but we have not experienced this first hand, nor do we have an accurate idea of how big or small “small” is, given the echo chamber effect on the Internet. We cannot recall a Windows service pack that didn’t break at least a handful of Windows installations, so this could simply be par for the course, it’s hard to say at this point.
At the end of the day then, we don’t have much of anything bad to say about SP1 outside of the “fix” for displaying the amount of installed memory on 32bit systems, so our recommendation is a straightforward one for Vista users to install SP1 once it becomes available to the public at large. It won’t knock most people’s socks off but the file and network performance improvements are long overdue and will be noticeable for practically every last user. Ultimately any user who has felt slighted by the poor copy performance of Vista will find relief in SP1, as will anyone whose pet-issue has specifically been fixed in Vista SP1. Anyone else who didn’t like Vista for other reasons will not be any more impressed by SP1 than they were by the original version; there are a few quirks that should have been resolved in SP1 that were not.
Compared to where we were a year ago, our general recommendation for Vista is unchanged. We are however impressed with the progress of the x64 versions of Vista over the past year after feeling like it had been lagging behind Vista x86 from beta up through the release version of Vista. Vista x64 is now clearly on a peer level with Vista x86 and we have no concerns about its compatibility or performance. There are still good reasons to stick with Vista x86 such as compatibility with specific applications or Vista x64’s higher memory usage due to WoW64, but these are the only reasons. A year ago we recommended using Vista x86 unless you specifically needed Vista x64, now we’re comfortable making the opposite recommendation and recommending Vista x64 unless you have a specific reason to stick with Vista x86.
Finally, for those Windows users still sticking with XP they too will be getting a service pack from Microsoft in the very near future with XP’s long-due service pack 3. We’ll be bringing a review of that to you as soon as it goes gold later this quarter, along with a fully up to date performance comparison between Vista and XP to better illustrate what little gap remains between the two operating systems. The list of changes isn’t nearly as reaching as Vista SP1, but there are a couple of interesting items on the list. Stay tuned for that in the coming weeks. |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
HenryTo
Site Admin
Joined: 06 Aug 2004
Posts: 7642
Location: Houston, Texas & Los Angeles, California
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Please log in to view without the ad banners |
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Statistics
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
