Let the Vista SP1 Melee Begin
 Joe Wilcox
News Brief. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is now available through automatic update. |
Do you want it? It will find you, eventually.
"While we're beginning automatic distribution today, you might not see it right away since the distribution process is very gradual," Chris Flores wrote on the Windows Vista Blog.
Microsoft does this to avoid overwhelming its Windows Update infrastructure. It's a sensible approach.
Apologies, I was tardy blogging this. I was caught somewhere between Microsoft's Mesh and the Apple earnings.
I'd like to survey Microsoft Watch readers who got the update through automatic updating about the experience. Did you have problems? A good experience? How is your Vista PC performance now? Please share in the comments.
Create, Communicate, Collaborate with IT Professionals at Ziff Davis Enterprise IT Link.
Comments (5)
I got it through Windows Update on 3 machines here:
Vista Ultimate 32-bit Dell 8300 Dimension
Vista Ultimate 64-bit Acer Laptop
Vista Enterprise 32-bit Generic machine
All took the update just fine and I have seen significant boost in performance especially on the Vista Enterprise machine in particular.
Specs:
AMD Sempron 1.6 Ghz (64-bit enabled)
512 MBs of RAM
nVidia Geforce FX Ultra 5200 (128 MBs of vRAM)
I originally had Vista Business on it. I notice areas such as boot time and Preparing the desktop have shortened significantly. The Start menu pops faster with sign of redrawing occurring, Explorer windows pop up faster in addition to minimizing and switching between applications.
Shutdown doesn't take as long as it use to either. So there are indeed performance boost in the SP1 update. Copying large files over the network is also another benefit. Moving a 58 MB iTunes 7.6.2 executable across network shares took less than 10 seconds, really amazing.
I have a lot of pictures in the Pictures Explorer and I notice when scrolling, there is no redrawing effects there especially for video thumbnails.
Posted by Andre Da Costa | April 23, 2008 9:41 PM
Hi Joe,
My machine has now been updated with SP1 (a Dell D620).
It seems faster already. A nice update.
Dave
Posted by Dave | April 24, 2008 5:58 AM
I just it Rolled up onto 20 machines on different ranges and specs in Spanish.
No problems so far and the OS seems faster, more responsive and better at handling the legacy apps some of them use.
I Noticed a couple of things like a better Terminal client connection and so forth.
Also the memory management for low ram computers has increased quite a bit. Opening a virtual machine doesn't hog the OS like it used to when it didn't have the SP1.
Posted by Luis Robles | April 24, 2008 9:39 AM
XP is going to get pulled so who cares what Vista is doing now. I will be skipping that hideous OS entirely.
MAC, Linux, XP Pro, I don't care, but it won't be Vista.
Posted by JM | April 24, 2008 11:57 PM
SP1 never showed up on my machine, even with auto-updates turned on (that's even after updating my Realtek drivers). Went through every step in their list that applied to me, but even WU wouldn't show it.
The problem that I really have with that is that AFAIK, Vista flat-out hides it from you and doesn't tell you that it's hiding anything (communicating information to the user is crucial). I dread the possibility that 6 months from now, I'll have a huge backlog of hotfixes that require SP1, but I won't know about it until I want to go to WU for a non-critical update (i.e. Ultimate Extras). What I would like to hear is that WU is being updated to report to the user in the scenario where auto-updates is turned on, but uninstalled critical updates are, say, 3 months old.
Posted by Keith Patrick | April 25, 2008 4:45 PM