Microsoft rolls out Vista SP1 Microsoft has released the long-awaited first Windows Vista Service Pack, a wrap-up of incremental updates that apparently cripples certain vendors' software. SP1 tackles reliability and performance, adds support for new hardware and wraps in earlier updates for compatibility with third party software. Microsoft claims more …
The more it seems like the best patch for it will be Windows 7.
Vista = WinME to me.
[still, at least with the names Vista and Server 2008, you won't have people asking for Vista 2008, like they used to with "Windows 2000 : Millenium Edition" ]
Bring on Vienna, or whatever it's called these days.
Steven R
Didn't this happen on Vista's initial release? Four our of eleven security products failed Virus Bulletin Magazine's VB100 tests (including MS's OneCare, McAfee Suite and Norton Internet Security).
Back then, VB Magazine told El Reg, "Security vendors have had plenty of time to develop Vista products, so there's little excuse for the failure rates unearthed by the test."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/05/vista_security_criticisms/
Keep it coming. The more garbage broken by Vista, the more quality products we'll see sprouting up. Think of it as evolution.
For those of you with short lives and/or memories:
Windows 1 took 5 updates (to 386)
Windows 3.0 took 4 updates (to 3.11)
Windows 95 took 5 updates (to 98SE)
3.51 and 4.0 each required until SP4 to be generally usable (or one could say Server 3.1 took 11 updates)
Windows 2000 wasn't nearly finished until SP3
XP didn't even reach poor until SP2
Average things out, adjust for differences in update methods, and two axioms stand out:
Wait at least 4 years or 4 Service Packs, whichever comes first.
If by chance a version of Windows sort of works before it is replaced, skip the next Windows entirely (ME, Vista).
I'm planning on doing a fresh install of Vista this weekend, so wasn't overly worried if SP1 went horribly wrong.
Installation did take a while - and M$ are still incapable of making a progress bar that works - For god sake - how difficult can it be - a progress bar shouldn't go straight from 0% to 100%, nor should should an installation have three different progress bars when one would do the job. A progress bar has one job to do - show the end user how far into a job their PC is, so they know whether to just go make a coffee, or go watch the Godfather Trilogy. /end rant.
When I came back to my PC, everything looked normal apart from some customer feedback spyware doohickey. I decided to copy the 400MB patch onto my backup server, and something weird happened - it copied the file. It didn't spend three hours calculating how long it would take - it just copied in a few seconds. I've just tried the reverse - I copied a 1.3GB file from my server onto my desktop - It instantly said it would take 34 seconds, and it did. That alone is worth the hours installation, as if it carries on working will save me time in the long run. Well done M$ (yes I know it should have worked like that from the beginning but if M$ feel appreciated maybe they'll fix other things too - like why I'm using 1GB ram when I only have Firefox running).
I'm sure there will be horror stories about this patch - And I may well have been led into a false sense of security only to get my head chopped off at any moment, but for the moment M$ still have at least one moderately happy customer.
Full administrative install is 400 odd Meg. Home user/single PC download is a lot less.
List of programs broken is tiny and the only one used by more than half a dozen people is ZoneAlarm. And there is a compliant version available. Does anyone actually check the extent of these issues before responding with the usual "MS is shite" stuff?
I used to dislike MS before I started reading the Reg. The ill-informed and over-dramatic FUD on here has made me more sympathetic to them.
Is there a reason someone should be using Vista?
Please tell me.
I cannot, for the life of me, discover the source of so much pro- and anti-Vista passion. It's not like anyone needs it.
It must, therefore, well-up from within through some illogical human need to 1) control the uncontrollable, or 2) disdain the unredeemable. Both seem a waste of effort, to me.
Or am I off my chum?
> Does anyone actually check the extent of these issues before responding with the usual "MS is shite" stuff?
Yes, actually I went through the process of clicking through all their readmes, release notes, software affected by, and readme firsts. Funny how I have to use El Reg to find the download link, but that's another rant.
Clicking on them doesn't work to well if you're running Firefox with NoScript, as their site is mostly scripted and has hooks to a dozen web-metrics sites. I "Print Preview"ed them and they looked like shiite so I try again on WinXP with Internet Exploder. The Print Preview looks like shiite there too.
It prints like it looks though. 52 pages of Hotfixes and Security Updates. 10 per page. Did you read them all?
There's even buried in there somewhere a link to a video presentation on how my Windows Genuine Advantage experience will change if I'm not genuine.
Y'know I've had my issues with Vista too..but..this story is either lazily researched or markedly slanted against microsoft. C'mon..look at the link to the technet article. Out of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of applications that can run on Vista, they list:
*Five* that are blocked from starting - and 4 of those have updated versions that resolve that.
*Three* that do not run under sp1 - and 2 of those have updated versions that resolved that.
*Three* that experience a loss of functionality under sp1 - and 2 of those have updated versions that resolve that.
That's it..11 total applications listed and 8 of them have updated versions that fix the issue. Not bad for an OS that covers the entire globe. Am I a windows lover? No..but for the territory they have to cover it's not bad. I have a Mac as well, each OS has its strengths and weaknesses. I made sure I ran Vista on hardware built for it, and keep it updated and virus free. It has been rock solid the whole time.
I wonder how many kids in the developing world will starve in the coming year so that we in the "developed" world can divert more and more food crops into fuel production in order to create enough electrical power to run this bloated monstrosity?
880 MB of RAM, 60% of a dual-core 64-bit processor, and 350 watts of electricity to run a bloody web browser? It's obscene.
Every time we have "upgraded" this product we've had to double the server count in the data center. Companies now spend more on getting the waste heat out of the server room than they used to spend on actual computing needs.
Fortune 500 companies are moving to new locations, not for any business purpose, but because they have exhausted all available commercial power in their current location trying to feed the insatiable needs of this bloatware.
We aren't doing one iota more work on Windows servers than we doing ten years ago, but we are doing it 100 quad dual-core, 32-GB, 1.5 kw servers instead of 10 dual processor, 512 MB, 500 watt servers because the OS now consumes 5 or more times the resources that the actual work does.
I tried to look at the process list on a VIsta 64 laptop today, and it couldn't even fit on the screen. I had to scroll halfway down what would have been the second screen to view the entire list of processes needed to run that single instance of a web browser.
When will this farce end? When we melt Antarctica? When we bankrupt every company on earth? How much money is enough, BillG?
13 Months later Vista is propped up on its feet by a zimmerframe made of 435MB of what should have happened pre-Vista, stumbles forth and then.........Falls flat on its flabby face! Ubuntu rushes over and asks are you ok? Ubuntu screams for help 'Anyone?!!! Please help!!!!! Vista is in trouble and needs help!!', Vista coughs and splutters and shudders all over. XP sniggers as big brother breathes his last breath. It's over... XP and Ubuntu go for a pint and laugh at what Bill had in mind for them.
You like it or not, here is the link for downloading it.
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b0c7136d-5ebb-413b-89c9-cb3d06d12674&DisplayLang=en
x64-based Systems:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=874a414b-32b2-41cc-bd8b-d71eda5ec07c&DisplayLang=en
Yay, looking forward to copying files in under 3 hours, well done Bill. Linux is for weirdy beardies - tho I'd go that route if I had to because Apple is... well it's just shite - itunes makes Media player look good for gosh' sake. I hate when a customer has itunes on their PC, insinuating itself into the software like a worm...
Proprietary hardware, how 1950's.
You all know it, Vista looks better than anything else out there... and as a computer engineer has kept me in much work.
Bill Gates because I love him so very very much.
Tony F Paulazzo.
Last night. It installed itself without a hitch and after a restart its, well, much the same really.
Haven't noticed any improvements as yet but then I haven't tried to move around lots of big files or anything too taxing, though it doesn't seem to have broken anything.
It wasn't anywhere near the 400-plus megabytes quoted though.
As an aside, I used to hate Vista (I'd never have willingly installed it) but it came pre-installed on a replacement laptop. After you turn off all the annoyances and tweak it a bit it's not half as bad as I used to think. It is resource hungry, true, but it does have rather good memory management.
The only thing that doesn't work are graphical DOS apps though text based ones are just fine. I use lots of those.
My biggest annoyance is the fact that modern laptops have no parallel ports and I had to buy a port replicator to give me an LPT1 port for a hardware dongle I need to use.
Its probably just that I am getting inured to Vista through everyday use. I can't say I like it but it works well enough. After all, no one is ever going to use it to run real-time mission-critical software but as a general purpose OS it is acceptable.
I still think OSX easily scores over it however but unfortunately I don't get paid to write software for that.
I decided to do a backup of me laptop last night in preperation for the big event.
This is the defining moment M$. You fuck up my laptop any more than it already is (why on earth does it take 3 minutes for my wireless to kick in on Vista yet with XP by the time I've logged in I'm on my network... I'm still bloody pissed off I need my SSID broadcast turned on just so you'll connect. On top of that I fail to understand how with a fresh install you give me windows errors everytime I'm in a VIDEO_TS folder) and I'm moving to linux...
Just try me sunshine, I've Mandriva sitting ready and waiting..
Paris Hilton because like me she expects things to go down on her.
Installed SP1 last night, it took about 20 minutes. My PC seems a lot more responsive, which is quite surprising really. I was fully expecting not to notice any difference.
Lot's of little glitches seem to have gone away, like the sub-second pause I used to get when connecting a mobile device and the screen flicker when tabbing in and out of games.
All in all, as a home user I'm pretty happy with it.
For those complaining about Vista using a lot of memory, do you know how it works?
Vista is not taking those rescources for itself. It has been designed to learn what programs you use most and pre-cache them on startup for faster loading times. It's called superfetch and there is a good article about it here
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html
Should you try and load something that isn't pre-cached, Vista will instantly free up the necessary resources and in my experience manages memory better than any previous version of windows
Well this is bad news.... Now my boss, who doesn't know a computer from an aardvark is going to start pushing for this behemoth to be installed company wide. I shudder when I think what may happen now. When an entire OS (like DamnSmallLinux or Slax) can fit on a measly 50Mb (DSL) or 190Mb (KDE Slax) and come with office apps built in. What the heck is in that update? Did they slap Office2k7 in there as well?
Downloaded in seven minutes, installed in 25 with three reboots and no fuck ups along the way. So far it seems ok, not sure if it's sped up much or if it's just a placebo effect, but file transfers have sped up from around 25-29MBPS to 40-43MBPS. I haven't had any Vista related problems anyway, so I wasn't expecting groundbreaking things from the pack.
I'm fed up with all the things that companies want running on my computer constantly. Without intervention on a fairly basic computer you get quicktime, real player, acrobat reader, java updater among many others.
What exactly does wdfmgr.exe do? A quick look round the net says it's something to make windows media player open quicker,though with or without it, my WMP opens at the same speed
ctfmon.exe "provides text input service support for speech recognition, handwriting recognition, keyboard, translation, and other alternative user input technologies." I don't want any of that
wuauclt.exe checks for updates even if I've got fed up with auto update interrupting me at the most inconvenient times so I've turned it off
Most of these files may be tiny but they add upto a hell of a lot
Turning off/killing/renaming these files frees up so much memory space and makes startup/shutdown quicker, makes everything run smoother and has no perceptible impact on how long anything takes to startup/run/update
A bit of control over what I have on my machine without hacking chunks out of the registry would be nice [/rant]
So....I gave Linux it's bi-annual go on one of my machines the other week.
Installed Ubuntu....all installed OK. Restarted....thought hmm this is taking a long time...maybe it's just the first boot. But no, performance was dire, much worse than XP, at *everything*. Here was me thinking Linux was 'lightweight'.
Then I tried installing Pidgin...but which of these 4 installed package managers shall I use? I'll the first one...oh dear, that one throws a nasty-looking text error at me, scratch that one. Next one....whoops I've failed a dependency, so where's the button I press to get the dependencies installed? Doesn't seem to be one, guess they forgot that part. Now I have a list of dependencies on a post-it, try hunting these down. Launch package manager again, but wait! "You cannot run more than one package manager at a time, please close XXXX". I@M NOT RUNNING ANOTHER ONE YOU PIECE OF CRAP I JUST WANT A FRICKING IM CLIENT.
Ok, breathe....lets go 'old skool' and compile from source. ./configure if I remember right...blergh, failed again.
...please wait while Windows XP installs. Yay I can manage my system from one interface without having to ever resort to a command line, praise be!
Bear in mind I'm a geek with a compsci degree, not a total chump. Linux is still a heap of crap as a desktop OS/
The thing is....
Why does it need to do all this pre-caching.
For years we ran without it and programs loaded perfectly quickly.
My Vista Machine is an
AMD Dual Core 5000, with 2GB memory.
A SATA 320GB harddrive which can pull data off at some incredible rate.
That's really a phenominal spec if you compare it to what we were running
a few years back.
and yet my Vista SP1 (Beta admitedly) machine runs like a dog.
It's constantly accessing the disk, and opening apps takes ages.
Yet my Apps apart from having a few tabs here and there... haven't changed much.
I tried clearing the pre-fetching and things did improve imensly... until it rebuilt
it all again... and now it's back to square one.
I'm sure theres some way of turning it off properly... but just for once it would be nice if it just worked out the box.
Network transfers now move at a brisk 40+mb/sec vs. pre-sp1 8-11mb/sec between my Vista Business desktop to SBS2003. It's odd that I got transfers like that between Vista and Server2008 beta 6 months ago. Did MS make the Vista TCP stack a bit more friendly towards XP/Server2003?
To the Vista sux, Ubuntu rules, bloated update, etc. crowd:
-Vista runs like a champ on my Q6600 with 2gb's of RAM, 10,000rpm drives, and 8800GTS video card. Maybe there should be a 'Proper Hardware Required' sticker on Vista OS boxes. I can see why you would complain when running Vista with yesteryear's PC.
-Ubuntu looks nice and is fun to play with in a window on my Vista desktop. PC-BSD is cool too.
-This bloated update took a whopping 4 mins to download on a 20mbit connection, it's 2008, lose the dialup.
I installed it a couple of hours ago and have had a fair few problems. Trying not get angry about it, but this will be my vent.
Tried file copying. Seemed fast at first, but then it got slower as the transfer neared the end. Then it stopped completely. Other apps stopped responding too, so had to restart.
Am now having endless problems with my external harddrive. Can't eject it from Vista, seems to be doing something with it and won't let it go.
While certain functions seem less sluggish, simple things such as opening folders take longer for me now!
And winamp is stuttering on songs every 2 seconds! Have had to restart my laptop 3 times so far because it becomes completely unresponsive.
There. I'm done.
Superfetch is a pretty good thing .... if you are robotic in your work.....and most people are. You arrive at work and 1st thing check your e-mail so that's not a bad thing to have it preloaded. If you load the same things at the same time every day, it's a great idea. It's just another extension of MS's "If we can't actually make it faster, let's make people it appear faster" strategy. It doesn't really make anything load faster, it just time shifts when it loads. If it can predict your behavior, it speeds things up, if it guesses wrong it DOES have to unload stuff before it can make room for new stuff so there is small performance hit.
But.....First off after booting to Vista you have to sit and wait for 45 seconds or so while the dog goes and fetches all this stuff. You'll note that benchmark program instructions actually call this out saying you have to wait at least this long so that pre fetch doesn't adversely affect the benchmark scores.
Again, this is an extension of the ole quickstart stuff that they had in previous OS's. Boot Win98 and up and you have a good part of IE that gets pre-loaded so it "appears" that IE magically loaded quickly. Ya would open any MS Office files and find that they also appeared to load quickly as installing MS Office put a little thing in ya start / run group that preloads part of MS Office at boot. Even Lotus and WordPerfect copied the technique to try and not "appear" to be slower. Doesn't really change the time it takes things to load ..... 4 seconds at boot time + 4 seconds when you click an icon is still 8 seconds.
If ya think there's no downside, do a search on "gaming / prefetch" and you'll see the benchmarks that show significant impacts on game performance of having prefetch on. In response MS has promised an easier way of making the changes defined below which now require registry edits:
http://dotnetwizard.net/?p=147
According to taskmanager at least, with liberal application of services.msc, I managed to get Vista to run around 300 MB and 390ish with firefox and winamp running. looking at performance monitor on kubuntu running on my laptop right next to it it appears to be about the same with Firefox and Amarok running though with not much tweaking.
Well enough of that, back to server 2k3
Paris because she is used to having to clean nasty stuff up
"Bear in mind I'm a geek with a compsci degree, not a total chump. Linux is still a heap of crap as a desktop OS"
I've never met anyone with a computer science degree who was any good with actually running a computer.
What verison of Ubuntu are you running to get four package managers by the way?
I have Add/remove programs and Synaptic Package Manager, both of which - as far as I can tell - are just frontends for Apt-Get command - so I think you should lay off the meth.
I'm going to put SP1 on the Vista box in the office to see if it breaks it...
I got Vista SP1 through Windows Update this evening, and installed it on three of my PCs -- a desktop (Vista Home Premium), a laptop (Vista Business), and a Flipstart (Vista Business). The installation was easy, smooth, and relatively fast. In all three cases the size of the download was less than 70 MB, and in all three cases it rebooted only once.
I immediately noticed one improvement -- selecting a networked printer to print a document no longer takes the 30+ seconds it used to take before.
Does it fix the speed issues, so that it handles the graphic acceleration API used by most real-world applications (in addition to DirectX, used mainly by games)?
Does it fix the other speed issues, so that files copy as fast as on Windows XP?
Of course, the fact that security is improved, so that you can no longer run third-party anti-virus software on Vista doesn't quite count as a plus... unless the anti-virus makers can offer patches, and this is a temporary side-effect of a real security upgrade.
Oh the irony.
My Vista Home Premium installation ran SP1 update this evening. On rebooting it said "Service Pack did not install. Reverting changes. Do not turn off your computer."
With an error message like that I of course can pin point the problem and resolve. Brilliant.
On the other hand, three months ago I started my linux learning curve. Mandriva dual boot with Vista and Ubuntu on my second PC. I'm not a techie, it's been quite a pleasant experience so far and Microsofts days are numbered in this house.
Installed SP1 yesterday. Right off the only real problem I've had with it was cured. I have to routinely move and copy thousands of image files and it was a jot to select a couple of hundred meg and not have Vista sit there for ten minutes before telling me it would take 3 days or so.
I'm on a HP HDX Dragon laptop so, thanks to them not having XP drivers for much of the hardware and a locked bios, am stuck with Vista. Thankfully it's a pretty pwerful piece of kit and runs Vista very smoothly, unlike older machines I tried it on. It's still anoying though when in XP if I copies files over older versions it would just asked replace all? one click, done. now it asks copy and replace? but with a tick box for apply to all items. So I have to make 2 mouseclick instead of one. Quelle improvment. Way to go Billy Boy.
Did the perfoemance test thing yesterday and got a lowest score of 4.7 which was for hard disk. Checked speeds when copying from master to slave and was getting around 1.4MB a sec. Is that good or bad? I supose at 4.7 it must be good but it doesn't seem fast to me.
Ah well, thank heavens for Virtualbox so I can still run a couple of legacy VPN applications in XP.
Whatever else is in SP1 God knows, I don't see any real difference other than the fiile copying starting the same hour as you ask it to.
"Learn how to use services.msc and edit your start up?"
Yeah good plan, we'll ignore the fact that not everyone is as godlike as you in their gurudom and some people have a life and don't want to spend hours fiddling with their computer, they just want to use it :O
Taking automatic update's wuauclt.exe as an example, yep, you can stop the service that makes this run, but then if you want to do a manual update, you have to go and restart this service before the update, then once you're done, disable it again.
Multiply this out by the large number of such services/programs/etc.
This may be an acceptable waste of time for you with all the spare time you have but not for real people.
As far as I know, for some reason the version of Vista's SP1 you get via Windows Update is only 65MB, as opposed to that big 435MB version available for download. Also, the Windows Update version can sort of 'suss out' any driver problems and so on, so all in all I think it's best to wait for it to be pumped out to your machine automatically..
Don't know why I'm even bothered, I installed Vista on my main PC and was determined to give it a fair go, but by the end of the 30 days I was sleeping with and caressing my XP disc like a little puppy. For the forseeable future, Vista is going to be the Windows ME for me.. i.e. I completely skip it after a brief test of it.
Adam
Linux definately is not for those people then. Ive been using Vista since last January (and beta releases before that). Currently, on SP1, I use 32 processes and around 580mb ram and thats with Aero. OPut of the box, yes its rather bloated and most of the running services the average user will never read. Its in their own interests to learn what each service does and really is doesnt take very long to scan through and get a rough idea of what each does. It doesnt require a 400 bage book and a degree in physics to figure out.
As for the windows update service. It can be disabled. You do not need to enable it each time you want to update, its only use is for automatic update search and notification. It does not stop you from performing a manual update search via the windows update control panel applet.
At least they've fixed the stoopidest thing ever - the way that the file transfer bar used to indicate completion by the NUMBER of files rather than WHOLE PERCENTAGE.
eg. if you moved 10 files, 9 being 1meg and 1 being 1gig, you'll zip along to 90% completed and wait until it finished the biggun.
I never did understand who designed that aspect of the interface, presumably some kid on work experience who had never seen a GUI before ever. At least a sixth former has now finished the job off properly.
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