Windows Vista SP1 review

Tuesday 12 February 2008, 8:53 PM

SP1 all pluses

I was a bit nervous installing SP1 beta on my new laptop as there were plenty of posts on the Microsoft SP1 forums with issues ranging from BSOD to random restarts. In the end I am very glad I did install it.

As the ZDNet review indicates for many people there maybe not much noticeably changed. However, as I use my system several hours every day I noticed quite a few changes and all of them for the better.

Setup is long but straight forward if you follow the instructions.

1) Faster Wifi connections - The time taken to detect and connect to a known hotspot is significantly improved. From taking anything up to a minute to find and connect to my home or office wifi it now takes less than 3 seconds and if you are connecting from boot up it is usually connected before you system can even display the network icon in the taskbar

2) Faster file transfer. After further testing there is significant improvement in file transfer speed on both the same hard drive and when transferring from another SP1 system. Transfer to and from non-sp1 systems and external drives is improved slightly but not enough that you would notice unless you did benchmarks before and after.

3) Now seems to recognise 4GB of Ram on Vista 32bit. Although memory Allocation seems to remain the same with some reserved for use by the OS to enhance certain hardware and therefore not available to the apps running on your system - at least now it does show as a 4GB system in most places such as system properties.

4) Improved Readyboost performance. Read and write times seems to be improved in general so unsurprisingly ReadyBoost performs better. Again it will greatly depend on the quality of your memory stick as to whether this is worth doing. ReadyBoost min req is just a 5mb/s read and 3mb/s write speed. With companies like corsair, lexar and toshiba/kingston offering read speeds in excess 30mb/s and write speeds of upto 25mb/s ReadyBoost is finally worth buying a memory stick for (corsair memory sticks with the "GT" suffix read at 34mb/s and write at 25mb/s). SP1 takes better advantage of these memory sticks as you get better overall transfer speeds and there maybe other tweaks.

5) Mobility Stability - there were often hiccups with going in and out of standby or hibernate on laptops running vista. Sometimes they wouldn't go into standby or would take a long time to do so. Other times they would wake up randomly by themselves and if they were in your bag this was a major problem. I would occasionaly open my bag to find my laptop extremely hot as it had turned on and sat cooking due to the lack of ventilation. Since SP1 standby and hibernate is a lot faster - on most occasions nearly instant. Restoring from sleep states has never failed (so far) and I've not had the random waking that was so annoying before.

6) Hard drive space. I don't know if this was intentional but I actually had MORE hard drive space free after the SP1 update than I did before I started. I expected the opposite so perhaps it removed some unnecessary data. It was only a few hundred megabytes so not a big deal.

7) Thumbnails generated faster. When I open picture folders the images load a lot faster than before. Unless the folder has a very large number of images in the thumbnails seem to be near instant. Even on folders I've not already generated thumbnails for or on memory cards.

8) Video playback is the only area that seems to have reduced performance. DivX video files are sluggish in windows media player and hi-quality/resolution files can even stutter. Playing the same files in another player resolves the issue. Doesn't seem to affect DVD/Blu-ray playback. I suspect there has been an update to Windows Media Player that affects DivX playback.

9) Overall stability is improved with noticeably less appreances of the blue turning circle (formerly an hourglass in XP) and program lockups.

More info in my related blog post.

My testing of SP1 has all been on my Dell X

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