Vista SP1 Release Candidate overview

When Windows Vista was first released, Microsoft touted it to be more stable, more robust and more secure than Windows XP. It was definitely more secure, with a much more mature firewall, integrated AntiSpyware and UAC. In my one and a half years of using Vista, I can definitely say that it is indeed more secure. However, within a couple of days of loading Vista, I came across a few performance issues. A clean install of Vista worked fine, but the moment I installed Avast and a few other apps, I noticed performance degrading. Also, internal reports from work showed that quite a few of our customers had performance issues, so much so that a lot of them switched back to XP. Ofcourse, as time passed, Microsoft relesed a number of patches, most noticably KB938194 and KB938979 which improved Vista's performance. Application updates by ISVs also increased the number of Vista compatible applications.

Back in September of '07, Microsoft announced the release of Windows Vista SP1, a whitepaper for which can be found here. I didn't really follow it in the beta stage, however, I just downloaded the Release Candidate and noticed one thing - it improved the performance of my RTM version of Vista Ultimate by about 20%. I noticed fewer lags, especially during system startup.

SP1 Install and usage

Installation of Sp1 went of without a hitch. The program literally needed 3 clicks before which the automated installer took over. Even though the install was totally automated, it took about 30 minutes to install SP1 on my system with an E6550 Proc and 4GB RAM. In the process, the system did reboot about 4 times. After the final reboot, when I got to the desktop, the first thing I noticed was a little message at the bottom right of my wallpaper stating my build number (6001 as against 6000) and that this was an Evaluation Copy. Surprised, I checked my activation status - the OS was still activated. I'm guessing that since this is an RC update, it is bound to be time limited.

After using the computer for a while, I noticed a few changes:

• The 'Search' option from the Start Menu was gone and I didn't really see any option in Start Menu properties to reenable it. The keyboard shortcut still works though
• Disk defragmenter now gives you the option of choosing which volumes to defragment as opposed to the original Vista defragmenter

Ofcourse, these were the obvious changes I noticed. One other thing I did see was when I launched Windows Update. Prior to SP1 installation, I had 3 Windows Ultimate Extras available - Hold 'em Poker game, Bitlocker and EFS enhancements and Windows DreamScene. I hadn't installed any of these extras. However, when I launched Windows Update, I noticed I only had two extras available - Hold 'em and Bitlocker Enhancements. The DreamScene update was no longer available. I suppose the final version of SP1 will enable DreamScene - not that I ever used it. Oh well.

Performance

As mentioned before, SP1 did increase the overall afeel and response time of the system. There was this one quirk I'd noticed about IE7 - with more than 8 tabs open, IE7 was consuming a whopping 500MB of memory. However, after SP1, the same number of tabs are comsuming only 213MB of RAM. Also, the time required to copy files from the system to my MemoryStick seems to have gone down. Not only that, time required to copy multiple files weighing at about a gig from one hard drve to another required no more than 15 seconds as opposed to more than a minute before. That is definitely some improvement.

Conclusion

I have been using SP1 for about 3 days now and these are definitely some changes. The performance increase is definitely noticable and beneficial. I'll keep evaluating the product and keep updating this blog as and when I notice something new. Keep checking back