My opinions on Vista SP1, 8 months later..

OzZie

OzZie

OzZie

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I bought Vista H.P. around 8 months ago.

First impressions were:

-General slugishness around windows (expanding, minimising etc)
-Terribly slow transfer speeds (hdd - hdd, network transfers etc)
-Lots of RAM usage compared with XP.
-Crashed quite a bit.
-Performance in new games was pretty bad (esp CoH)

Anyhow, today i had time to install Vista and was eager to try out SP1 (beta). After 8 months, it felt virtually the same when it was installed. Immediatly installed SP1 and rebooted. I never thought i would say this but what a difference!

-Transfer speeds have more than doubled! Before, transfering from one SATA drive to another would yeild around a 12mb/s transfer rate, and it fluctuated vastly. Now i can copy documents and files at a constant 42mb/s. :)
-General browsing is much much smoother. In fact, dare i say, it feels smoother than XP. :)
-Gaming is virtually the same as XP. I've only tried Kyne & Lynch as of yet but i couldn't tell any difference between XP and Vista. My older games that are installed such as CSS and Richard Burns rally run exactly the same.

So i am very glad that i installed it. Although i had problems finding how to get it (doesn't show on Windows updates, had to get it manually from Windows website) However, it is right that i don't have the watermark that everyone is complaining about on the desktop? Also, under 'System' it doesn't say Beta or RC1, just Service Pack 1. Is this correct? :)

Anyone who thought the way i did about Vista should try SP1 :cool:
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Being an ex m$ employee I forsee Vista being another version of Windows ME!


Just a personal thought!


Happy new year by *** way :D
 
OzZie said:
-Lots of RAM usage compared with XP.
Click to expand...
I agree with none, other than the well-documented transfer speeds (which I never suffered, but have seen systems which have, my work PC included) and the above, which is a good thing. What's the point of having RAM not being used? Why do people go to massive lengths to make sure their RAM footprint is as small as possible. Is there anything more counter-intuitive? Linux has been doing it for years, and Vista is the better for it. Precaching is excellent. You just need to give it time to settle and learn.

superplay said:
Being an ex m$ employee I forsee Vista being another version of Windows ME!
Click to expand...
Well, Vista works. ME didn't (whether it's worth it over XP or not is down to your own opinion and needs).
 
I have tried to install SP1 on 2 occasions now and my PC blue screens after the install. I've had to reinstall from an image both times. It gets to stage 3 of 3 and on the next reboot it blue screens. I also cannot install Sp1 for Office 2007. Other than that Vista 64 bit has been great in all other respects, games included.Any ideas
 
Lol it makes me laugh its pretty much the same bitching that everybody was doing when XP was launched, its slow uses too many reasoureces has compatability issues etc etc, "I will never Install XP, Win 98/2K ***!"

Its not really a matter of if you will you will use Vista its more like a question of when you will use it.
 
I actually used http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...7A-E925-48FB-9D6D-50FE9461F808&displaylang=en as download speeds direct from Microsoft are always top speed. Windows updates seem to take forever :o

Yes, drivers can be hard to find, and a lot are un-optimised, but i most of the time you can find what you are after. I've managed to get drivers for all of my hardware no problem at all (both 32 + 64 bit) but then again most of my stuff is quite popular (Audigy, DTV, Wireless Dongles etc).
 
when SP1 is officially released, can i expect a new bought copy of vista to include this already in the disk? After seeing a mates laptop updating after a format with an XP pre SP1 disk there was quite a long wait I dont want this:)
 
I used an MSDN image with Vista SP1 pre-intergrated. To be honest I've not noticed any differences over the vanilla Vista I use at work other than lots of little things like Tweak-UAC don't work and theres no Dreamscene support

So it's like vanilla Vista, only with less useful features. It did save me installing all the patches though which was why I installed the SP1 image instead.
 
TweakUAC works with SP1, but the security center warns you every 10 minutes that UAC is disabled which gets irritating. I just use the built in admin account instead which avoids UAC without having to turn it off

As for Dreamscene it's not showing up as an option to install with SP1. Yours must be special or still there as a result of upgrading as you cannot install it fresh with SP1 :(
 
Stonedofmoo said:
TweakUAC works with SP1, but the security center warns you every 10 minutes that UAC is disabled which gets irritating. I just use the built in admin account instead which avoids UAC without having to turn it off
Click to expand...

You can just tell Security Centre not to notify you. Turns those messages off immediately. Or disable the Security Centre service.
 
I couldn't get the SP1 to work, when I tried to login it said something about group licence something cannot access that memory area so I just rolled back.
 
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