Vista 64-bit - Service Pack 1 Arrived!

[Beth UK]

Out of the blue it arrived 45 minutes ago - Vista Service Pack 1, via windows automatic update. Entire installation process took ... well... 45 minutes.

I didn't think SP1 was due until early-mid March via automatic updates? Still, it's here! Have to say I was dreading it's arrival a little bit due to some of the pre-warnings about driver conflicts etc and past experiences with Windows Service Packs returning many settings to their default 'factory' settings. But, no, as far as I can tell the Service Pack has left things as they were - right down to my daily warning that "User Account Control is switched off" 

There we go! I have to say again that while I continue to run XP on certain systems my experience with Vista 64 continues to be warm and loving!! For me it just works, despite my fiddling and tweaking. 

[Renegade]

While I haven't updated to SP1 yet, I'm finding Vista very nice. I do hate the copy stuff, but whatever. There are worse things in life.

Does SP1 fix that nasty copy delay thing?

[f0dder]

SP1 is supposed to change explorer's copying algorithm quite a bit - and give much better SMB/CIFS performance when talking to other SP1 (and server2008?) computers... but SMB is still going to suck speedwise for older OSes, Microsoft probably won't make SMBv2 upgrades for those OSes.

[nontroppo]

Mark of Sysinternals fame writes about the copy engine improvements here (link temporarily down when I tried though):

http://blogs.technet.com/sysinternals/archive/2008/02/05/updates-autoruns-v9-10-sigcheck-v1-50-mark-s-new-blog-post-and-webcast.aspx

[nontroppo]

For the millisecond fetishists, ZDNet have benchmarked Vista RTM and SP1:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1367

Conclusions: Vista RTM was faster in all tests than SP1.

The same writer also tested the file-copy engine in Vista SP1 and XP SP2:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1332&page=5

XP is faster than Vista in almost all tests. So whatever improvements are in the Vista SP1 copy engine, though a probable improvement over RTM, they are still overall slower than XP.

[jgpaiva]

Cool, more stuff to bad-mouth vista! Thanks nontroppo

PS: this is not an anti-vista flamewar post, i was just kidding and thanking nontroppo for the info

[Renegade]

I like where in the ZDnet article comments someone points out an article from the same author where he says exactly the opposite!

[jgpaiva]

Here's the article renegade mentioned.

[nontroppo]

That article talks about the file-copy engine improvements, not general processing benchmarks (i.e. there is no contradiction), where SP1 *is* better than RTM, but the SP1 Vs XP SP2 file-copy tests then show it still ain't XP yet...

[f0dder]

That article talks about the file-copy engine improvements, not general processing benchmarks (i.e. there is no contradiction), where SP1 *is* better than RTM, but the SP1 Vs XP SP2 file-copy tests then show it still ain't XP yet...

That's plain silly! (silly as in idiotic, not as in I doubt your claims). With all the kernel enhancements in Vista (notably support for >64kb block transfers and prioritized I/O), they should have been able to do better >_<

Anyway, copying between SMBv2 capable machines should show much better performance than XP is capable of (since it only supports SMBv1), as long as you have your NICs configured properly (frame size etc...)

[fenixproductions]

They added Extensions (crappy ones) and broke mouse gestures