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Microsoft spreads Service Pack love to testers

Microsoft announced last week that it completed work on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and released it to manufacturing. Unfortunately for consumers, Microsoft also announced that that the update wouldn't be available to consumers until around March.

However, current beta testers for SP1 will be glad to know that they can download the service pack right now. Microsoft makes SP1 available for download in a number of ways.

Testers can download a single .exe file with the SP1 update in x86 (Windows6.0-KB936330-X86-wave0.exe) or x64 (Windows6.0-KB936330-X64-wave0.exe) flavors. The next option is to download a registry file which gives testers access to SP1 via Windows Update. The third and final way that testers can install SP1 -- x86 and x64 versions -- is via a standalone ISO installer which allows the service pack to easily be installed on multiple machines via a CD.

Microsoft lists the build version for SP1 as 6001.18000.080118-1840.

In other Windows news, the still popular Windows XP operating system is getting another update courtesy of Microsoft's Connect website. The Redmond, Washington-based company uploaded Windows XP SP3 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) for beta testers to try out.

The Windows XP SP3 RC2 update is available in five languages and weighs in at about 315MB for the English version.

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good news
By Gul Westfale on 2/11/2008 11:26:32 AM , Rating: 2
an update is always good news... and RC3 for XP means that i can probably hold out on buying vista for a little while longer. too bad they have no plans to release DX10 for XP.




RE: good news
By ajfink on 2/11/08, Rating: -1
RE: good news
By Gul Westfale on 2/11/08, Rating: -1
RE: good news
By Spivonious on 2/11/2008 11:47:21 AM , Rating: 5
I once thought as you do. Then I actually used Vista for a few weeks as my main operating system. Using XP at my office is torture. It's slow and clunky-looking and I have to use the mouse to find a program and open it.

Give Vista a chance. $135 is not a lot of money for something you'll use everday for at least 3 years.


RE: good news
By dagamer34 on 2/11/2008 12:05:50 PM , Rating: 3
If you just called XP slow and clunky, I question your sanity.


RE: good news
By Brandon Hill (blog) on 2/11/2008 12:06:54 PM , Rating: 5
Agreed. I've haven't found much that Vista does faster than XP IMHO.


RE: good news
By ChronoReverse on 2/11/2008 1:06:23 PM , Rating: 5
It's a little odd. There's little that Vista can do that's benchmarkable. That is to say, if you're testing with standard benchmarking procedures (i.e., run one program and see how long it takes), Vista will almost always be slower to some degree.

Interestingly enough, I do a lot of work involving VM's and large datasets that require a great deal of hard drive activity. Somehow, my XP machine with a faster dual core and a faster desktop hard drive can't handle the same disk loads as my slower Vista64 laptop (also dual-core but slower and a laptop hard drive) that has less RAM.

If I were merging disks or loading a snapshot, I would've basically lost the use of my XP machine (e.g., if I tried to open Firefox so I could browse DT while waiting for the task to finish it wouldn't load in forever) while the Vista machine was sluggish but still usable.

I have had a similar experience with my desktop machine as well although that isn't a fair test case since it's fairly monstrous (3GHz Quad cores, 8GB of RAM, RAID 0 for the system drive).


RE: good news
By omnicronx on 2/11/2008 1:16:57 PM , Rating: 5
I have found Vista loves ram . If you have 2Gigs+, your Vista experience will probably be better than your XP experience.
The new prefetch is also a lot better in vista, programs I use all the time like firefox and foobar2000 open instantly.


RE: good news
By mindless1 on 2/11/2008 9:48:32 PM , Rating: 1
Umm, just tried it on a 2K and XP system here, both of those programs open instantly once you've ran them one time, and barely take much longer the first time. If you're saying prefetch means you dont' wait the first time, might I remind you that you do have to wait until after it's been prefetched?

It's generally wrong to think all Vista needs is ram because if you have that much on XP, it too can catch everything and run faster than Vista does. Ram is not the factor except in the opposite view that indeed, both OS do need at a bare minimum to have enough that not only are things not swapped out but that sufficient memory remains for a persistant filecache.


RE: good news
By ChronoReverse on 2/12/2008 7:30:12 PM , Rating: 2
First off, SuperFetch also loads stuff into memory before you even run the program if you've ran the program before (and thus flagged as a program that the user... uses). So that alone is ahead of XP.

Second, surely you've encountered the case where you've had your computer on overnight and when you start using it the next morning, it's all sluggish as XP has paged most of the memory out (yielding LOTS of free memory) and now it's grinding the hard drive. Won't happen in Vista since now it knows that free RAM is wasted RAM.


RE: good news
By mindless1 on 2/12/2008 9:03:34 PM , Rating: 2
First off, it isn't necessarily desirable to have your system spending time filling the memory with things you "might" run, and that memory often being flushed when applications request memory.

Second, no when I start using it again after a period of inactivity it has not paged everything out trying to make free memory. I suspect you might have had a buggy program running with a memory leak.

That old saying that free ram is wasted ram is a cop-out. When your operating system fills up memory with things you might do, it reduces the memory you would have to cache the things you actually DO, do. I don't just mean application use of memory since it can be flushed, I mean the filecaching of what you actually use in those sessions too.

Your ideas are confounded by reality, that people do notice Vista runs slower with 2GB, 4GB of memory, except for one moment - the first time you run an app on XP. The funny thing is, when you have so much more memory to allocate to apps on XP than on Vista, you can keep applications running instead of having to shut them down to conserve memory so there is no filecaching factor remaining anymore as the app isn't being restarted.

For example, I don't reload my email, office, brower dozens of times a day, they are always running because there's no relative reason not to do so unless there were a memory leak as you seem to have had in the scenario you described.


RE: good news
By ChronoReverse on 2/13/2008 10:37:06 AM , Rating: 2
You do want your memory always filled. It's called caching and the idea has been around forever. Dropping memory cache for use if something's not in the cache has no penalty. Basically it turns into the same situation as XP where you don't have as agressive caching. This is already done in most other modern OS's so it's not like it's a MS innovation. It does make it a good thing.

I'll repeat that. There isn't a penalty for dropping the cache memory. The worse case scenario is the same as the normal XP case.

So it's not a cop-out but rather proper thinking. You've been brainwashed by either the "memory compression/cleaner" companies of old or the hearsay that followed for years afterwards.

As for the paging effect, it's been around for ages and quite well documented. As long as you're actually using multiple programs that use a significant (i.e., more than a couple megabytes), this behavior can occur.

As for running slowly. Vista clearly has a large 512MB overhead over XP. This is the true reality and must always be considered. If you're running something that requires almost all of the 2GB, then OBVIOUSLY Vista is going to have trouble.

However, once you mitigate this part of the equation, Vista's performance is only marginally slower. If you look at more "recent" (dating from September of last year anyways) XP versus Vista gaming benchmarks, the performance is already within 10% in most cases (there are a couple of games that have really poor performance in Vista while a few oddly have slightly better performance).

You'll notice that my reasoning is quite balanced. Unlike people going "Vista is slow slow slow. It can't hold a candle to XP at all" or people going "Vista is the next sliced bread, XP is a primitive beast beside it", I'm only pointing out some of my own anecdotes plus what is theoretical.

Perhaps you should do some research on how memory caching is supposed to work before you completely dismiss agressive caching.


RE: good news
By Calin on 2/12/2008 3:37:11 AM , Rating: 2
Your dual core laptop uses XP Professional or Home Edition? Home Edition is one processor only


RE: good news
By 306maxi on 2/12/2008 6:06:13 AM , Rating: 2
Did they say they had 2 CPU's in it?


RE: good news
By ChronoReverse on 2/12/2008 7:30:50 PM , Rating: 2
I'm not sure you even read the post properly. Both machines are Vista machines running on dual-cores.


RE: good news
By Mitch101 on 2/11/2008 1:17:37 PM , Rating: 2
You should try installing 98 on a 4ghz wolfdale with raptor hard drive. You cant sneeze faster than it boots (NIC disabled).

Its pretty funny for your friends to check out your new PC and you boot to 98SE on it. They are a bit freaked at how incredibly fast it boots though. So if you think Vista boots fast try 98SE and wonder why todays machines are so incredibly slow at booting. Be sure to have a PS2 keyboard and Mouse to install 98SE.


RE: good news
By omnicronx on 2/11/2008 1:26:23 PM , Rating: 2
Network drives, Hard drives, raid configurations, NIC cards, all of the other chips added to computers since 98 (sata etc) all add to the loading time of your computer. In fact really depending on how fast your machine is, a raid configuration can add 30 seconds to your boot.

But you are right, 98 does load damn quick.


RE: good news
By TomZ on 2/11/2008 1:32:53 PM , Rating: 2
Any version of MS-DOS boots faster than any version of Windows, so what's the point?

My old Commodore 64 "booted" as quickly as I could turn it on? Should I pitch my Vista machine and start using my C64 again?

Anyway, booting is stupid anyway - why trash out your computer's state all the time? Putting the computer to sleep or hybernate makes much more sense. You get a quick "recovery" time and your machine is in the same working state as when you left it - same apps, browser, etc. as when you shut it down.

When I open my laptop, I get a login prompt as quickly as I can open the lid, and when I shut the lid, it goes to sleep. What could be more convenient than that?