Vista SP1 – the case for the defence
If you’ll remember, a while ago I had a bad experience with Windows Vista Service Pack 1, release candidate 1.
Well, it certainly seems that Microsoft did quite a bit of work following that release candidate.
Since SP1 isn’t yet available via Windows Update, so I had to go through the standalone installer route (I’ll tell you where to get them later). But first let me give you a little bit of background as to why I decided to give it another go.
Vista was starting to run really slowly. REALLY slowly. In fact, nearly a month after removing the release candidate of SP1, it was again unusable. Fortunately for me, I’d backed the machine up with Norton Ghost
I then got out the old trusty Windows 98 bootdisk and wiped all the partitions except my clunky Vista install. I then created a 32GB FAT32 partition and copied the Ghost image files to that. Then I rolled back to a Vista backup from January 2008 (well, I’m skipping a step – I went back to XP for 24 hours. I’ll tell you why I decided not to stay that way at a later date).
The installers took a long while to download, and the installation took about an hour. It was fairly straightforward: next, next, next, next, ok, I agree, etc. And even though it said not to run anything during installation, it didn’t complain about Spider Solitaire 
So what’s the outcome?
Not much has changed, except I have a solid computer again. It does feel slightly faster – not much, I have to admit: the short time I spent back on XP felt faster for a while – but it does feel more reliable.
Most of the actual improvements – UEFI support, cryptographic improvements,
But file copy performance? Seems a bit quicker, but then I usually use Directory Opus anyway, and I suspect some of those improvements will be in Windows Explorer.
As for the numerous minor tweaks made, and delays they’ve removed, I suspect they all go towards a psychological feeling things are working quicker – and they certainly seem to be to me – so it’s all good.
So the verdict? No marks for RC1, but for the full release – I’d say seven out of ten. Maybe it didn’t have all the performance improvements they were touting, but it’s worth the time and effort.
If you want to get hold of the standalone installers yourself, you can download the five-language standalone installer for 32-bit or 64-bit Vista (they’re 434MB and 726MB respectively, and cover English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese), or the all language version, again available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions (these are 544MB and 873MB). Alternatively, if you’ve got a lot of PCs in your firm that will need updating, you can get the installer discs – there’s a 544MB ISO image for 32-bit PCs, as well as a 1418MB DVD ISO for both 32 and 64 bit versions.