Vista Service Pack 1 Test Drive

By Joe Haygood | December 14, 2007

Being the risk taker that I am, I downloaded and installed the RC1 candidate for Windows Vista, and I have put together some thoughts on it. Overall, the Service Pack seems to make things a little quicker, but I have yet to find a truly compelling feature that is selling me on the upgrade. Keep reading to see some of the issues I have had with Vista, and whether this patch has fixed them, left them alone or made them worse.

Well, the first thing you need to know about this upgrade is that it makes you jump through some hoops to get it. While there is a full IT Professionals full patch for download, a lot of times, it is way larger than you will need, so it is not really recommended. The first thing you have to do is trick Windows Update into finding the Service Pack. That can be done via this patch from Microsoft. Sounds easy, except now it will take three more reboots before you get the update, because there are several other critical components that will get installed first, and they will require reboots.

Downloading the patch was pretty straight-forward. Demand is high for the patch right now, which is slowing down the download speeds. It took me about 35 minutes to download 77.9 MBs, which was determined by looking at the fixes I had already installed. The install follows most of the same steps that went into XP Service Pack 2. The install runs a few items, and then shuts down the machine. During shutdown, it goes through a three tiered install process. Total time to login screen from the start of the patching process was about 65 minutes.

The sign in process still seems to take a long time from cold start to the last line of the startup file. It seems that they have not optimized the boot process, still opting for people to use the suspend feature to make them feel that the computer is booting faster. I would of thought this would be a major priority, but it seems to have been bypassed.

Upon logging in, the first weird item occurred, which was the update to Live Messenger. Not sure if this is part of the update or it installed it because it was already on the system, but could be an annoyance for those that don’t use the product if it is installed automatically without a way to opt out of it.
The system did not seem any faster, although in some game tests, I did notice a boost by maybe a couple of frames a second in Crysis and World in Conflict, but strangely, I noticed slowdowns in Gears of War and Kane and Lynch, both Live for Windows games. Changing the detail level of shadows seemed to bring up the frame rate, but it will not bode well for those that are hoping for speed improvements in games.

Also, there are still some browser instabilities that I have not been able to get past. Seems every now and then, IE7 seems to just lock up. Normally happens on certain pages, which I think have a lot of JavaScript. I was hoping this would be patched, but it does not appear to be at this time.

One thing that was of note, and this had been mentioned in several publications was the change in text for those of us that own Vista Ultimate. We were supposed to be getting all of these extra downloads, which so far have amounted to Language packs, Texas Hold’em, Dreamscape screen saver and the Bitlocker EPS upgrade. Well the text of that page has been change. Instead of the flowing paragraphs that mention the program all the updates we will receive, it has been whittled down to a two sentence section stating that these are add-ons. No mention anymore of how many or how often, so it looks like Ultimate users got shafted on this one.

Ultimately, the upgrade to SP1 at this time has not really shown me any net changes in the OS. The final component will have more features in it when it hits in January, but as of now, this will not help anyone make the decision to switch to the new platform for games. Unless people see significant frame rate increases, there is nothing that will make a gamer switch to Vista, even with this Service Pack.