The Web has been abuzz with chatter about Windows Vista's upcoming Service Pack 1 (SP1): What it will and will not fix, how it will affect performance, how long will it take to install, and so on. PC manufacturers, some journalists, and a great deal of torrent addicts already have the service pack, and we're among that crew. While there are lots of things to write about SP1, the first thing we're going to focus on is performance. Sure, security is important as is compatibility, but we're hoping SP1 turns Vista into the screaming speed demon Microsoft once seemed to suggest it would be. Of course, when we say performance, we're mainly talking about games, but we checked out other areas in which it supposedly improves the Vista experience as well.
Prior to the coming of SP1, Microsoft released a batch of "hotfixes" for Windows Vista to tackle such issues as the ridiculously long time it takes to locally copy a folder full of files, the time remaining dialog box seeming to fall asleep at the wheel, memory allocation glitches in games and other graphical activities, and serious SLI performance issues. Maddeningly, those fixes aren't available through Windows Update; you have to manually download and install them.
What, we then asked ourselves, is the performance advantage of SP1 over simply installing the hotfixes? Will the upcoming service pack further boost Vista's power above and beyond the benefits the fixes offer over a vanilla installation of the OS? We decided to look into this question a bit further, along with plenty of synthetic and gaming benchmarks to prove it. The answers might surprise you
Our intrepid analyst Jason Cross detailed four important hotfixes for Windows Vista several months ago. Even with SP1 on the brink of release to the masses, they're worth a look. If you visit that article, be sure to check out the second page as well as the first; it links to the two important gaming fixes.
Now, that said, what's the point of a big, fat service pack if Microsoft has been gradually fixing Vista all along? The answer is, of course, that there's much more in SP1 than Microsoft has released through Windows Update and through hotfixes, all of which are included in the pack.
You can download a full list of the fixes contained within the 434MB service pack and also a briefer document that lists the highlights, directly from Microsoft. Here are some of the performance-related notables:
- Service Pack 1 should improve the speed of copying and moving folders with lots of files and subfolders within them. Furthermore, it's said to improve performance over by as much as 25% when copying files locally on a single disk PC.
- The service pack should allow Vista to do a much better job with the copy progress "time remaining" estimate.
- SP1 should improve "overall media performance by reducing many glitches," according to Microsoft.
- By including the SLI hotfix, SP1 should allow games to scale better to SLI configurations when compared with single-card configurations.
- Windows Vista will now report the amount of system memory that's actually installed in a computer, instead of reporting the amount of RAM available to the OS. In other words, 32-bit Vista users will see the full amount of memory when, for instance, they go into the Control Panel's System applet, even if they have as much as 4GB installed.
- SP1 cuts down on User Account Control checks in some instances (like cutting the interruptions from four to one when a user creates a folder in a "protected" area).
That's just the tip of Iceberg SP1. While it took almost two hours to install on a relatively clean hard drive (and that's from a locally saved copy) and rebooted the machine three times in the process, it may have been worth the wait. The service pack, thankfully, can install itself without intervention; you just tell it to reboot automatically and it takes over. Go away for a few hours and come back to see the Installation Success dialog box.
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