Windows Vista SP1 review

The first Service Pack for Vista has taken just over a year to arrive, and will appear automatically in Windows Update starting in March. We got hold of the standalone install code ahead of time to see how it affects 32-bit Vista in everyday use.

The first thing to note is that Windows XP SP2 skewed many people’s notions of what a service pack should be. Service Pack 2, bringing with it major new features like the Security Center applet, was more like an operating system upgrade.

Back to basics

Vista SP1 takes things back to the more prosaic days when a service pack was primarily a bug-fix and general reliability polish, bringing no great reworking of the OS and no terribly significant new features.

Even though it’s not a total overhaul, installation is still a pretty major affair; you won’t able to use your machine for a good while once you kick things off. On our test desktop – a Core 2 Q6600 machine with 2GB RAM, a two-disk RAID array and a 32-bit Vista installation – it took around 45 minutes.

A more realistic test installing on a laptop we use every day – another Core 2 machine, with 1GB RAM – took a painful 1hr 15mins.

After all this work don’t expect any dramatic changes, though. In fact, the only obvious way to tell that SP1 is running is to click the Start button and look hard at the default menu. Where once there was a ‘Search’ item above Recent Items, there’s now just a dividing line – it’s been expunged in an attempt to level the playing field for other search engines.

Performance improvements

The single most persistent complaint about Vista has been its sluggish performance with simple everyday operations, in particular copying files to and from external devices and over the network. We’re glad to say that under SP1 these problems have been addressed, if not completely solved.

Network copy speed has been significantly improved. When copying large files over a gigabit network we found speed nearly tripled: sending the same 1.9GB of data to an XP machine took 3mins 55secs before installing SP1, but just 1min 33secs afterwards. Copying the files back was faster too: 1min 3secs before and almost twice as fast after, at 37 seconds.

In practise the “Calculating time remaining…” notification still seems to spend a strangely long time doing its calculating before file transfers start, but it’s not as protracted as before.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is slow read performance from external drives. Copying the 550MB SP1 EXE file from a USB thumbdrive to an XP machine took 17s. Even after installing SP1, Vista took 41s for exactly the same operation.

Microsoft claims that the speed of resumption from Sleep mode has been increased, but this will depend on your hardware. We measured no difference on our test laptop: it remained unchanged at 11 seconds, and same was true for resuming from Hibernate.

There’s no significant change in application performance either. On our desktop machine, the application benchmark result was in fact slower, with a score of 1.39 overall compared to 1.42 before installation. That’s a slowdown of only around 2% though, which is close to the bounds of experimental error.

It’s still the case, however, that if you want the fastest application performance you should stick to XP – previous tests indicate that Vista is 8% slower.

Extra features

New features are mostly related to security: BitLocker drive encryption (only available in Ultimate and Enterprise version of the operating system) was previously restricted only to the system partition unless you resorted to the command line, but can now be applied to other local partitions and volumes. There’s also an extra three-pronged BitLocker authentication method, using TPM, USB hardware token and a PIN.

Technical encryption enhancements include a random-number generator able to use a TPM (trusted platform module), and on the data-security front the Vista Backup tool can now back up files encrypted using EFS (encrypted file system).

Microsoft claims to be working hard to get Vista compatible with as many applications as possible, but there are some that work under pre-SP1 Vista and then break after the install. To be fair, the list is very short – you’ll find it here, and there are workarounds or updates for most of them.

Other enhancements claimed for SP1 include improved network browsing speed, better battery life in some circumstances and the removal of “the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DELETE and the password prompt appearing”. These are problems that manifest themselves in very specific conditions – the battery life on our test laptop was unchanged – but if you’ve experienced them, you may find that SP1 will solve the problem.

The remainder of SP1’s enhancements are more difficult to assess, being generally focussed around increased reliability. IPv6 networking is claimed to be more robust, for instance, and Microsoft also claims SP1, “improves overall media performance by removing many glitches,” which is a statement that’s so vague as to be untestable. If you find you have trouble with media playback though, it’s worth giving SP1 a whirl.

Given that it’s free, the only reason that there might have been not to install SP1 were if it caused significant problems that the original didn’t. We’ve certainly not come across any of those during our testing. So, while it’s not a silver bullet that will silence the ranks of its critics, SP1 looks a solid release that you should install as soon as it’s available.

Details
Software subcategory	Operating system
Requirements
Processor requirement	N/A
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	yes
Operating system Windows XP supported?	no
Operating system Linux supported?	no
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	no
Other operating system support	None