Windows Vista SP1 Hands-On Details 409
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.'"
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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When you guys get excited about a pre-release of a service pack, you're in enormous need of fresh air.
Parent wasn't a troll. Parent has healthy sarcasm.... on what must be the most enormous news dead night of the year, or perhaps decade.
Nothing fixes Vista because XP wasn't broken. Lipstick on that pig won't get on your collar. Trust me on this.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Hooray!
Windows Vista: The Wow ...starts now!
Windows Vista SP1: Small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook ...will be made available to even more testers at a later date!
I can hardly sleep.
Main changes coming with SP1 (Score:5, Informative)
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http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_sp1.asp [winsupersite.com]
Also note that this SP will contain hundreds of fixes as usual (especially retroactive changes and hotfixes released over the year on MSDN), so this are the major, most noticeable ones.
Yes, but... (Score:4, Funny)
Service packs: (Score:5, Funny)
the fixes to the OS in the
same way as they always have because the one
thing they've never done
over the decades,
and we know it, is to thoroughly check
over an initial release
again and again to make sure that it's good enough
and therefore we are all
expecting that there will be many
different service packs to fix the
results.
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Re:Service packs: (Score:5, Funny)
It's really kind of clever. (Score:4, Informative)
The message has nothing directly to do with the "prose". Read just the first word of each line. If you still don't get it, google the "definition of insanity".
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But, I have to ask, (excluding those of you with Tablet PC's, because everything I've read indicates that Vista is pretty nifty on them) why?
Do you really think anything you do will work better on Vista than it would on XP Pro?
I'm in the "you can pry Win2k from my cold, dead, hands" camp myself. But XP p
Re:Yes, but... (Score:5, Informative)
My experience is that it Just Works. Everything is set up with a minimum of hassle and prompting, the defaults are sensible, and most of the eye candy has at least some redeeming value. (Like alt-tab shows you a small version of the windows, which is updated in realtime.) UAC is basically SEWindows, and it gets the same treatment as SELinux does (immediately disabled). But it's hard for me to fault Vista for that, since it is pretty much what every security expert was screaming for Microsoft to add.
Plus, Vista actually feels much more like it has a unified UI. I'm sure a MacOS user can tell you that the UI is more than just a window frame and menu bar: it's the "feel" of the whole thing that matters. Well, everything that comes with Vista (with a few aggravating exceptions, which fortunately I've never had to use more than once so far) has that "feel." If you've ever used IE7 on XP, you've probably noticed how utterly weird and confusing it is. Well, in Vista, it makes complete sense. (I still don't use it, of course, but I was tempted.)
I'm not a huge Vista booster or anything. The above makes me sound like I am, but you asked for reasons to use Vista, not reasons not to. But when I have to use the OS -- this computer is mainly a gaming rig -- I like it better than XP. And so long as I don't have to do any serious work, I much prefer it to KDE and GNOME. (For serious work, I need Unix. If I had to make do with screen and Alt+Fn, I would.)
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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:Yes, but... (Score:5, Funny)
[Allow] or [Cancel]
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And might I say you asked for that one?
SP or New OS? (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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Re:SP or New OS? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I think he is more questioning how much of these changes are rollbacks to the "old way" of doing things rather than "the way would thought would be good enough". If not, well that would be my question =).
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All O
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I would be interested in finding out what they've done to the copy because i have a strange copying issue with Vista. It refuses to copy any large files over the wireless. With a file over perhaps 150MB it will copy the first part, then the copy dialog will hang and say it's unable to finish copying (as if you've turned off the other mach
Did you say MUSIC files? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I will take the odds that this is the "everything Vista" RC for the support tech or network administrator who wants to test every possible configuration from Basic to Ultimate.
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Both... Vista and Windows Server 2008 share the same core like NT always has with the exception of XP/2003 Server.
So all the work that has been happening at the kernel and even Win32/Win64 level of Windows 2008 Server is also updated and applied to Vista, moving its kernel to be the same as Windows 2008.
So yes there are some basic SP fixes, but most of the fixes were already a part of the Windows 2008 development.
Which means Vista S
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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
Times (Score:4, Insightful)
Could be wrong, but whatever, let's party, SP1 is near!
Re:Times (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to sound too much like a troll or anything, but until it is downloadable, I for one will not consider it "near".
SP1 was scheduled for release this past summer (from MS announcements shortly after Vista Consumer release).
SP1 was then delayed to "by the end of the year" (from comments made a month ago)
SP1 (from MS's latest comments which you can find here: http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2218/071115vistaskip/ [itworld.com] ) is now scheduled for release in Q1 2008.
I guess "near" is a subjective thing... but as of right now, it seems they really have no real release strategy... until it is done, I am not betting on "near" or even "sometime soon"
What really interests me is that they are quite well aware of the need to address these issues quickly if they want to see a greater adoption of Vista by businesses and/or home users considering upgrading - yet the release date, for a Service Pack that only addresses some of the issues, keeps slipping.
Yes, I agree it is a good thing that they don't release the SP till it's ready - but it kinda scares me that they need to put in so much time to fix the issues that they are addressing - and scarier still, that in trying to do so, their release date keeps slipping... it kind of makes me think that when they looked at the issues and underlying code, they collectively said "Wow, this is really a mess... we need a LOT more time than we thought if we are gonna fix this" (well, I think doubling the release time is a LOT more time... though considering their recent OS release schedule, they may disagree).
It makes me seriously wonder how severely wrong some of their programming decisions (or "push it out the door, ready-or-not" decision) with Vista really were - and how adequately a Service Pack can really address those issues. (is this gonna be just another band-aid?)
Typical OS timeline (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 dropp
Epic Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Performance.
2. Security.
3. Anything that early technical adopters care about.
It it is an epic disaster because of:
1. Lack of backward compatibility (software and hardware).
2. Non-technical people being aware of (1).
Therefore, testing whether files copy 2% faster is like exhaustively examining a bolt in a tanker that has run aground and split in half.
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Re:Epic Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
But will it increase sales of Vista? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can't compare the XP-Vista change to the 3.1-95 change. 3.1 didn't have a start menu and didn't have a close button in the upper-right corner of every app. People had to, quite literally, rele
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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 accompli
But what can it do that XP can't...? (Score:5, Insightful)
So is there a reason to upgrade from XP? I don't see one.
If you hadn't got the Premium version for free would you have paid $400 for it?
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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 e
Too late (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Just my experience...
just wondering... (Score:5, Funny)
...does it also now display the XP logo at startup?
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
The question is, does this make any difference?
Just Installed.. (Score:2, Interesting)
* 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 e
Re:Just Installed.. (Score:5, Informative)
Windows XP SP3 please (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista isn't on my personal radar, nor of my employers. But installing a fresh XP and having to install 80 odd updates is a PITA.
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Vista isn't on my personal radar, nor of my employers. But installing a fresh XP and having to install 80 odd updates is a PITA.
Why not install Linux on a desktop, show them that it is easier to pick up on Linux as the buttons are in the right place? Or switch to Macs. Or in at least provision for it. That is only buy equipment known to run Linux so if Microsoft sticks to sliding XP prematurely into the unsupported bucket you have options.
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Heh, we already use Linux for everything bar one or two things
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Re:Windows XP SP3 please (Score:5, Informative)
6 years ago...
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-01-05-001-04-NW-LF-KN [linuxtoday.com]
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 16:01:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Linus Torvalds torvalds@transmeta.com
To: Kernel Mailing List linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: And oh, btw..
In a move unanimously hailed by the trade press and industry analysts as
being a sure sign of incipient braindamage, Linus Torvalds (also known as
the "father of Linux" or, more commonly, as "mush-for-brains") decided
that enough is enough, and that things don't get better from having the
same people test it over and over again. In short, 2.4.0 is out there.
today
http://kernel.org/ [kernel.org]
The latest 2.4 version of the Linux kernel is: 2.4.35.4 2007-11-17 17:44 UTC F V C Changelog
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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.
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Since most of Microsofts userbase is on XP up until MS gets Vista up to par with it they would alienate most of their userbase if they didnt release updates for their old OS.
Kind of funny you mentio
Re:Windows XP SP3 please (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, there are upgrade paths to new versions of Debian, but they also exist from old to new versions of Windows.
[0] http://www.debian.org/security/faq#lifespan [debian.org]
90 seconds considered good? (Score:3, Interesting)
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... and my Macbook Pro will come out of standby in about 1 second (plus however long the wireless handshake takes). Plus, it's reliable enough that if I put it into standby I *know* it will come out. I basically never reboot or hibernate. No need to futz around and remove functionality just so I can open my laptop and be working more quickly.
Why haven't either Microsoft or the makers of any Linux distro been able to get standby right? Mac notebooks have been like this since OS X came out in 2001.
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Actually, for much, much longer than that. (Unless you had AppleTalk on, then it could take as long as a minute to wake from sleep. WTF?)
Ironically, Linux on PowerPC-based laptops has had stable sleep for as long as I've dealt with it. (~2001.)
-:sigma.SB
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My white-box machines also run Vista and S3 sleep / hibernate as well.. including my 4GB Vista 64 machine.
That's all well and good.. sleep/wake/hibernate/resume should all just w
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Polishing a turd leaves you still with a turd (Score:2)
Not true... (Score:5, Funny)
Superman could do that.
Only I don't think anyone would like shaking hands with him later.
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Not true at all (Score:2)
Honestly, I dont get all this windows stuff. 90 seconds to boot and that's an improvement?
what is the case for running Vista? I forget (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some people need more memory. Some don't.
I want to know if Vista is the slowly corroding mess that XP is. Which forces you to reinstall XP every year to keep things snappy. And in some cases, functional.
Different security model (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Some content please (Score:3, Insightful)
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Woe be those who criticize Slashdot editorial practice, but was that about the most pathetic "review" that you've ever seen? For those who haven't read TFA, all of the comments here about boot times are because that the only substantive thing mentioned in the article.
I don't know what planet you're from, but there's a huge difference between 20 pages long Anandtech reviews and a news post on a medium-sized PC magazine. I say news post - not "review" as you put it - because it is located in /news/column/. Its purpose is only to bring the news without going in-depth on the topic.
You say that only a few comments were of any substance, which is true. But what do you expect from a news item? And was it not important news to current and future Vista owners? I use it and I
Great News (Score:2)
Thank the GNODs.
Blocked program at start-up (Score:4, Informative)
However - where the Hell is the checkbox to remember my choice?.
Having to do this on every boot is crazy. It was funny that this issue was on the "Windows 7 Wishlist" - it should've been one of the first updates out the door after RTM, and at the latest, SP1.
In case anyone still has nightmares about this, there is a work-around apparently - http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?sduid=0&p=6509411 [slickdeals.net]
When will MS adopt a security-roll-up model? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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Same shit, different kernel (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Longer = speed improvement?! (Score:2)
Quote from article (emphasis mine):
An INCREASE in time is now considered a performance improvement? Wow, it looks like Microsoft went beyond redefining "downtime" and is now into redefining faster as slower and slower as fa
The Pace Is Still Way Too Slow (Score:2)
Leopard just came out last week, and there is already a service pack: v10.5.1 is already out. Most Mac users will never run v10.5.0, because it's already automatically updating itself to v10.5.1 and within six months v10.5.3 will come out on a new DVD and on all new Macs. So Leopard's first-release flaws were caught by early-adopter users and fixed right away by Apple, they are already h
Vista Supporters' Rebuttals (Score:5, Funny)
1 minute, 51 seconds? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Time to Unplug (Score:3, Funny)
Users of Microsoft Windows Vista can rejoice in the fact that Microsoft just released a preview of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release
If users of Microsoft Windows rejoice over a stupid service pack, users of Microsoft Vista need to get out more.
Re:40 second boot time an improvement? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:40 second boot time an improvement? (Score:5, Funny)
Hibernation sounds like something you'd attribute to a bear though. When you wake the bear up from his hibernation prematurely he's going to be pissed and maul anyone around him. I prefer a much nicer term like "safe sleep" which brings to my mind visions of a baby sleeping in a crib peacefully under the watchful protective gaze of its parents.
Re:40 second boot time an improvement? (Score:4, Insightful)
It turns out competition is.
So much for granting monopoly rights to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts'.
Re:40 second boot time an improvement? (Score:4, Insightful)
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1:30? Are you kidding? What the hell is so wrong with Vista that it takes so long to boot? Don't they cache anything to disk?
Re:40 second boot time an improvement? (Score:4, Funny)
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Ten Myths of Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff! [roughlydrafted.com]
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In early releases, it it displayed a progress bar during system loading, along with the name of the service that was loading. With Tiger (?) the progress bar was just a timer, and it stopped displaying the names of loaded services because there wasn't time, and because things were all loading concurrently. In Leopard, there is no progress bar. It just loads the window server and then it's up.
Mic
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My Pentium 3 laptop will boot from power on to console (including BIOS) in 18 seconds.
Add another 10 for KDE.
You'll never see Vista booting from power on to fully functional system (not slow and laggy with things still loading) in under 30 seconds.
No need for making ram images or that kind of nonsense.
Thats like applying a bandaid to a amputated arm.
It is infact possible to make a computer boot fast without an
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Re:How I crashed pre-SP1 RC Vista (Score:4, Informative)
All that said, I think the idea of prioritizing multimedia is fine but there should be a method to turn it off (perhaps a registry setting).
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that has a lot to do with your hard drive speed. I ha
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I have a 256MB XP SP2 system, basically stock, in my office. Your definition of "acceptable" and mine are very different. Simply having Firefox and Word open, with a couple windows each, and swapping between the two causes pageouts and enormous delays.
XP is acceptable for basic use with 512MB. Not 256MB, IMHO.
Now Vista, on the other hand, doesn't even seem truly happy in 1GB. I have 1GB and 2GB Vista systems that I use, both with reasonable or better CPU power. The 1GB system is slow and prone to pauses
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Memory hogging monsters they are, but Firefox and Word all this particular system is used for. I expect the majority of XP users out there, since XP is more dominant on the corporate desktop than anywhere else, need a web browser, Microsoft Office, and not much else. I've never used an XP system with 384MB (although, strangely enough, my main Mac had 384MB back in the early G3 days). It might be adequate for Word and Firefox, but based on the performance of a 512MB system, I'm not convinced.