Observations and Closing Thoughts
As far as the Vista user experience is concerned, users shouldn’t expect any significant changes with SP1. In this respect Vista SP1 is much like any other Windows service pack, rather than being another XP SP2. To that extent if you threw a pre-SP1 system and a post-SP1 system in front of us, we’d need to do some low-level benchmarking to identify which one was using SP1. In day-to-day use, the difference is not obvious outside of the specific improvements we’ve talked about.
For those curious about how long the SP1 installation process takes, Microsoft has said it will take anywhere between 20 minutes to over an hour. Some of this boils down to simple hard drive performance, with slower drives taking longer to update all of the files SP1 patches. Given our own installation efforts, we suspect that there are other factors that are non-obvious - in other words, your mileage may vary. In general Vista x64 will take longer to patch than Vista x32 due to the additional files that need to be patched under Vista x64 (e.g. there are a number of files and libraries that come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions). On our official test system we clocked Vista x64 at 33.5 minutes to install from start to finish, while a laptop took just shy of an hour. You’ll definitely want to go find something else to do for a bit while Vista is patching, and if you're running an ultraportable laptop with a 1.8" hard drive you will very likely break the one hour threshold.
One thing that is unfortunate for Microsoft with SP1 is that there is a good chance that system performance immediately following the patching process will be lower than it was prior to patching. As part of the installation process the SuperFetch and ReadyBoost subsystems are purged of all caches and learned behaviors, effectively reverting a patched system to that of a brand-new untrained system. Vista does not take long to retrain itself, and Microsoft notes the process can take a couple of days (we were back to perceived normal within a day), but nevertheless a lot of people are going to be thrown off by things such as longer application load times immediately following the patch.
Finally, coming into SP1 we heard some concerns about application and driver compatibility. While we cannot test everything, we have not run into any new issues with SP1. We have heard within the last day that a small number of systems are having an issue with one of the SP1 pre-patches (patches that are required prior to installing SP1) causing an infinite reboot sequence, but we have not experienced this first hand, nor do we have an accurate idea of how large the affected “small” group of users is, given the echo chamber effect on the Internet. We cannot recall a Windows service pack that didn’t break at least a handful of Windows installations, so this could simply be par for the course; it’s hard to say at this point.
At the end of the day, we don’t have much of anything bad to say about SP1 outside of the “fix” for displaying the amount of installed memory on 32-bit systems, so our recommendation is that all Vista users to install SP1 once it becomes available to the public at large. It won’t knock most people’s socks off, but the file and network performance improvements are long overdue and will be noticeable for most users. Ultimately, any user who has felt slighted by the poor copy performance of Vista will find relief in SP1, as will anyone whose pet-issue has specifically been fixed in Vista SP1. Anyone else who didn’t like Vista for other reasons will be no more impressed by SP1 than they were by the original version; there are a few quirks that should have been resolved in SP1 that were not.
Compared to where we were a year ago, our general recommendation for Vista is unchanged. We are however impressed with the progress of the x64 versions of Vista over the past year, after feeling like it was lagging behind Vista x86 from beta up through the release version of Vista. Vista x64 is now clearly on par with Vista x86 and we have no concerns about its compatibility or performance. There are still good reasons to stick with Vista x86, such as compatibility with specific applications and Vista x64’s higher memory usage due to WoW64, but these are the only reasons. A year ago we recommended using Vista x86 unless you specifically needed Vista x64; now we’re comfortable making the opposite recommendation of running Vista x64 unless you have a specific reason to stick with Vista x86.
Finally, for those Windows users still sticking with XP, they too will be getting Microsoft's long-overdue XP SP3 in the very near future. We’ll be bringing a review of that to you as soon as it goes gold later this quarter, along with a fully up to date performance comparison between Vista and XP to better illustrate what little gap remains between the two operating systems. The list of changes isn’t nearly as far-reaching as Vista SP1, but there are a couple of interesting items on the list. (Ed: It will also be nice to not install over 100 patches/updates/etc. after a clean XP SP2 install.) Stay tuned for that in the coming weeks.
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7Enigma - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
It's probably to prevent all the tech calls saying, "Gee golly, I have 4 Giga-bites of RAM, but the screen only says I have 3! Where'd the other one go!".I don't see a problem with doing this, as if you care enough to know how much is actually addressable you probably already know the rest of the story anyway.
sprockkets - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
Any word if you can use a non sp1 key with a sp1 disk?Most of us hate vista for some reasons, like it for others. It just happens to be that the reasons why we hate it are more than why we like it, such as the way you have to pick how audio is sent to outputs (i.e. analog or digital, but not both at the same time as in previous versions, also that darn cdrom audio input I need), UAC, the fact that after your initial install of Vista that those 80 updates will then cause it upon shutdown to process, then upon restart will spend even more time processing the updates (albeit it only happens once and sp1 will do it for you, for now that is), and of course, everyone's favorite, why the hell did they have to change things like how to remove programs?
Did SP1 restore the cdrom audio input? Probably not. No, I use it for my TV tuner card which Microsoft feels I no longer need to use, which I can still buy.
And for UEFI, perhaps now we can take control of features that should be in the BIOS, yeah, right (I'm looking at you Intel for not putting in S3 standby support on your D201GLY v1 and 2 boards!).
7Enigma - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
Many people use nLite or other programs to slipstream a service pack (among other programs and hotfixes). You can then burn this as a new .iso cd and use that in place of your original disk. Short story:I have a 3 year old system that I never reformatted (I know, the shame). When I built the system SP2 had just come out so my XP disk already has sp2 included. But obviously in 3 years quite a few (100's?) updates and hotfixes have come about and it would be a real pain to reformat and then have to go through all the reboots and installs. Not to mention the chance that during this my system could become compromised from a previous exploit.
So I started hearing about "slipstreaming" and spent some time reading about it. These programs basically create a custom installation disk with exactly what you want (and excluding what you don't want), so that you can reformat the drive, install the slipstreamed version of XP or Vista, and have only a handful of updates (I think I had 8 updates total, and required 2 reboots). This is a fantastic way to start from scratch without spending a lot of time.
RyanVM (at least for XP) keeps an infrequent update pack that I used with my SP2 disk to enable the reformat I described above. Once SP3 for XP comes out you could slipstream it to your existing disk in 20min and be ready to reinstall. Really I'll never go back to the old-fashioned way of hosing a system.
HTH (and I apologize if you already knew this)
kdog03 - Wednesday, February 27, 2008 - link
Well?Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 28, 2008 - link
No. That's a fundamental limit of 32bit operation, it can't be fixed.mcnabney - Wednesday, February 27, 2008 - link
In regard to the network throttling to make room for audio. A gigabit connection will be trimmed back to 80Mbs, 8% of capacity. Anandtech writes:"We’ll fully admit the problem will only affect a small number of users (those with gigabit networks who need high network performance while using multimedia applications), but then we’re exactly that kind of user."
Hmmm. Lets think. What might need more than 80Mps while using audio? Hmmmm. How about, playing HD video off of a local media server?
HaZaRd2K6 - Wednesday, February 27, 2008 - link
I just recently bought an eSATA enclosure for backups (FAST!) and in the article you mention "The only significant loser here are file operations over high-latency high-bandwidth links". Would eSATA be included in this list? Any chance of some numbers to check eSATA performance?trparky - Sunday, March 2, 2008 - link
The only difference between eSATA and SATA is the connector. Everything else is the same, even the data encoding used to transmit it across the wire.ellis - Wednesday, February 27, 2008 - link
Does anybody know of any good benchmarks made measuring the multitasking performance on Vista? (vs. XP?)And I'm not talking about the ability for multi-core optimized applications ability to distribute it's load on several cores, but on the ability to run several demanding single threaded applications in parallell nicely distributed on the avalable cores.
So does anyone know of any test that has focused on this aspect of utilizing a multi-core CPUs?
Perhaps comparing dual-core with quad-core, on XP and Vista?
Griswold - Wednesday, February 27, 2008 - link
I cant think of a single benchmark for this other than the "benchmark suite" they use here at AT sometimes (bunch of apps doing certain things creating alot of load and timing it). But I wouldnt really need that as vista always felt more responsive with multiple heavy load tasks than XP - and it even does so on this almost 1 year old install.I would like to expect MS being able to improve on the far from perfect task scheduler that comes with XP for their new flagship OS. As far as i'm concerned, they succeeded.