Your Vista SP 1 experience

[Guest bunnny]

I decided to start this thread to see others opinion..What they think about Vista SP 1 and meanwhile to exchange more useful tips & suggestions about it.

Please, share you experience and let's together

wait for Vista Vienna

[cluberti]

First, welcome to THE forum bunnny!

As to Vista SP1, I find it incredibly more sprightly in almost every way on my test machine (single-core AMD 3700+ w/2GB RAM and 1x 160GB SATA hdd). I've not had a lot of testing with my main rig (2x AMD Opteron 2300 quad-core w/64GB RAM and 4x 147GB SATAII), but that seems faster in almost every way too, so far (been on the test box for a month, the main rig only 1 week).

[Guest bunnny]

First, welcome to THE forum bunnny!

As to Vista SP1, I find it incredibly more sprightly in almost every way on my test machine (single-core AMD 3700+ w/2GB RAM and 1x 160GB SATA hdd). I've not had a lot of testing with my main rig (2x AMD Opteron 2300 quad-core w/64GB RAM and 4x 147GB SATAII), but that seems faster in almost every way too, so far (been on the test box for a month, the main rig only 1 week).

Thank you for welcoming me, Cluberti!

nice rig

I'm still designing my new baby(my sig) and soon will be up, so don't pay your pro-attn to it

Regarding SP1 I am still under suspicious testing , so we'll see it in the coming weeks!

Edited February 24, 2008 by bunnny

[Zxian]

Vista SP1 does seem far more responsive on my laptop than RTM did. It's a Pentium-M 1.86Ghz, 2GB of RAM, and 160GB 5400RPM drive. At times when RTM would pause while catching up with all the things that were going on (I multi-task a lot), SP1 is much snappier.

[snaithg]

Had SP1 installed for a few days now, can't really say that I have noticed any improvements as yet. Will keep looking though.

Running on quite old spec Toshiba laptop so maybe this is the underlying problem.

[Legolash2o]

SP1 with vLite... excellent! Working perfectly and flawlessly. No errors, BSODs, Crashes, etc...

[suryad]

I have read a fresh install with SP1 probably shows the most improvements. Also there is an article out by LanZen that should be an itneresting read for all Vista SP1 users. http://www.blog.lanzen.co.uk/?p=67

[Legolash2o]

Intreaging, that article was made March 2007 which was about a month or two after vista was released, there has been hundreds of fixes since then Still a good find though

Edited February 24, 2008 by LegoLiam™

[Beresford]

RDP client is working better for me, I can now connect to clients I couldn't before without tweaking networking.

Also, RDP remembers the domain and username you last used to connect to a specific server.

[cluberti]

I love that article.

The issue won’t affect OEM users who buy new workstations with OEM software pre-installed, but will catch corporate users upgrading from XP. It could lead to piracy claims against upgrading companies. At best resources will be tied up sorting out the mess. Not good.

Any IT staff upgrading to Vista and cought off-guard by this (either at RTM or now) should be ashamed of themselves. All it takes is a KMS server and your KMS keys to bypass this. Not to mention the BIGGEST gaping hole in the antipiracy initiatives of XP / 2003 and older was the VLK product key not requiring activation, and this was well documented and passed on to shops with SA agreements (and to the internet as a whole) that this WAS going to change in Vista and Server 2008. Any shop who does their research before rolling a major upgrade out would no doubt NOT be caught by this. A non-starter and sensationalism at best.

Symantec have just produced an excellent report into a number of serious flaws in Microsoft much-hyped secure operating system. They’ve found that far from protecting users from common virus and trojan infections, Vista actually poses a higher risk by giving users false assurances of protection.

Symantec lab-tested 2,000 common varients of malicious code, like backdoor, keylogger, rootkit, mass mailer, Trojan, spyware, adware and unsorted. They installed them as a user might, watching how Vista handled them. They tested if they could run and if they could survive a re-boot.

Yes, that's the key phrase there, "as a user might", most likely clicking the "allow" button in the UAC dialog. I make this assumption based on the results, especially changing protected reg keys - this can ONLY happen if the admin allows it by disabling UAC or clicking "allow" when prompted, because these accesses always trigger UAC. This is of course what some people will do when presented with the dialog if they aren't paying attention, and yes, bound to be a problem. If someone says "yes, please install this virus as the sysadmin", what do you expect to happen? I'm sorry, but users CANNOT be saved from themselves if they aren't willing to be a part of security (security is something you do, not something you buy or some software you run, for goodness' sakes), and this isn't a Microsoft problem per-se. It's why companies like Symantec have a place in the world. If the user had clicked "don't allow" in the UAC dialog, I'd wonder how many of these (at RTM) would have installed and run, and I'm even more interested at SP1 if this would have changed. Again, a bit of sensationalism (yes, a security study sponsored by an antivirus vendor, no conflict of interest - let's spout it as fact!!!).

A Symantec technical source has said “The implication is that the vast majority of Windows Vista hosts are, by default, remotely accessible via IPv6 and Teredo”.

This places a serious risk on a conventionally-protected network. Microsoft have concentrated on protecting their marketing advantage and not consulted network standards and security authorities before releasing this feature.

Sheesh - Teredo is IPv6 tunneling to another IPv6 host over an IPv4 network. Yes, it'll bypass IPv4 firewalls and routers if they allow the IPv4 traffic (like all other IPv4 traffic that's allowed, btw), but the end host has to be an IPv6 host to receive the packets, and it is hopefully running a firewall that can accept the IPv6 traffic tunneled over IPv4. The traffic tunneled over IPv4 will then pass through the firewall on the host once it's back to IPv6 traffic (if Vista or another host with an IPv4 and IPv6 firewall), so I fail to grasp the "problem" here. If someone turns the Windows firewall off, or installs an IPv4 only firewall, then yes, this is a possibility, and one that should be thought out and prevented when you enable IPv6 on a host! As to enabling it, eventually you have to enable IPv6 on clients by default, or we aren't going to get there fast enough (and no, I fail to see how enabling IPv6 causes a security risk because only other hosts running IPv6 can talk to the Vista box over IPv6 (regardless of whether it's tunneled or straight IPv6, and the admin should have already secured those machines, dammit). Another "sensationalism" meant to scare you, when in fact, IPv6 and IPv4 are firewalled on Vista hosts by default, so I see this as yet another non-issue.

Instead of offering Vista users a higher level of security than XP, Microsoft is actually exposing them to further and far more sinister risks with Vista. And that is unforgivable.

The only thing unforgivable is the unresearched and obviously biased opinions from this site on the issue(s). Don't believe everything you read, kids.

[suryad]

I went to a friends house today and installed an 8800 gt and a blu ray drive and upgraded his PSU for his HTPC. He has Vista Ultimate running on it. It had SP1 installed on it. I tried copying the downloaded Nvidia drivers from one folder to another. It took 10 minutes and didnt even finish. It was only 30 MB. I hit Ctrl X and Ctrl V simple right? Vista was flabbergasted apparently.

Next was shutting down the machine after installing the drivers. took 30 min. Not kidding. Ok more like 22 min and then we gave up and hit the pwoer button and restarted it. This is on a dual core 2 ghz with a gig of ram. Granted not the most powerful machine but it should have still run decent. What a piece of barf Vista is. I do like the UI though...

[Zxian]

Next was shutting down the machine after installing the drivers. took 30 min. Not kidding. Ok more like 22 min and then we gave up and hit the pwoer button and restarted it. This is on a dual core 2 ghz with a gig of ram. Granted not the most powerful machine but it should have still run decent. What a piece of barf Vista is. I do like the UI though...

There's something else going on there. You can't say that a whole operating system is garbage because of one incident. I copy multiple files back and forth and haven't noticed any major slowdowns when it comes to that. Startup on my laptop is comparable to XP SP2, and shutdown is actually quicker.

My laptop is by far less powerful than that system (Pentium-M 1.86Ghz, 2GB DDR2-533, 128MB ATI X300 mobility, 5400RPM notebook hard drive) and Vista handles the limited hardware better than XP ever did when I put the machine through it's paces.

Vista with 1GB of RAM is slightly limiting, but shouldn't be causing the problems you describe. The extremely slow file copying and slow shutdowns indicate another problem, either with the hard drive subsystem, or some other hardware related issue.

[cluberti]

Next was shutting down the machine after installing the drivers. took 30 min. Not kidding. Ok more like 22 min and then we gave up and hit the pwoer button and restarted it. This is on a dual core 2 ghz with a gig of ram. Granted not the most powerful machine but it should have still run decent. What a piece of barf Vista is. I do like the UI though...

There's something else going on there. You can't say that a whole operating system is garbage because of one incident. I copy multiple files back and forth and haven't noticed any major slowdowns when it comes to that. Startup on my laptop is comparable to XP SP2, and shutdown is actually quicker.

My laptop is by far less powerful than that system (Pentium-M 1.86Ghz, 2GB DDR2-533, 128MB ATI X300 mobility, 5400RPM notebook hard drive) and Vista handles the limited hardware better than XP ever did when I put the machine through it's paces.

Vista with 1GB of RAM is slightly limiting, but shouldn't be causing the problems you describe. The extremely slow file copying and slow shutdowns indicate another problem, either with the hard drive subsystem, or some other hardware related issue.

Or antivirus, or windows defender (although in SP1 I haven't seen this cause a disk issue like it could in RTM), or anything else with filter drivers.

Don't always blame Windows for other vendor's problems. You should always do some research before blaming the host for something (like slow file copy) - in RTM, this may actually have been true, but it's far less likely in SP1. Those speeds are REALLY slow, at least RTM would finish. I'd bet antivirus is the cause there, or perhaps a 3rd party firewall.

[kutster]

Now my question is How did you guys get SP1? I have looked around and can't seem to find a download anywhere. See I am hoping to reinstall Vista soon and want to have SP1 when I do it instead of later. Possibly Integrate it into my installation, but I rather not wait till mid-march to do it.

[snaithg]

Now my question is How did you guys get SP1? I have looked around and can't seem to find a download anywhere. See I am hoping to reinstall Vista soon and want to have SP1 when I do it instead of later. Possibly Integrate it into my installation, but I rather not wait till mid-march to do it.

Downloaded mine from MSDN ("Top Downloads").

Graham.