PC World Tests Final Version of Vista SP1

Mac writes "PC World ran the final version of Windows Vista SP1 through a first set of tests last night. Here's the bottom line: 'File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster. But other tests showed little improvement and, in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.'"

Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

After installing Vista SP1, it has been determined that the Vista SP2 will be a Vista uninstaller with a full version of XP Professional.

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

Great!
Now thousands of snarky PC techs everywhere will be wearing T-shirts saying: " *I AM* Vista SP2! "

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

I found XP to be a bit too bloated and insecure for my tastes, can I get a double downgrade to 2000 pro?

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

I know you're kidding around, but there is some truth to this. On fresh installs, many former Windows 2000 users would routinely disable the extra services and eyecandy that were so prominent in XP, trying in vain to negate the loss in performance that came with the move to the newer Microsoft OS.

On most hardware, the older Windows 2000 had a huge performance advantage over its newer cousin--tirelessly proved out in benchmark after benchmark--that never actually went away until...ever. Microsoft just stopped supporting the older OS without special contracts, and people just sort of stopped using Windows 2000 in general. And so XP became the new performance baseline.

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

> On most hardware, the older Windows 2000 had a huge performance advantage over its newer cousin

I completely agree. Even compared to Windows NT 4, 2000 never looked bloated. But that is where my praise ends: it might be small, but it was still difficult to use in a lot of places. Windows XP did actually improve the usability quite a bit, although style wise it was a mixed blessing. And since SP2 there is no comparison: XP is just a lot more secure.

I think those are the main reasons that 2000 died out without much notice. On 64MB of RAM, it might have the edge, but you can by 1GB for $30 now. And Windows XP works just fine on any computer less than 5 years old. I don't see the same thing happening with Vista any time soon.

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

File copying, one of the main performance-related complaints from Vista users, was significantly faster.

Good News: The integrated spyware/trojan horse functionality has seen significant performance enhancements. The overhead imposed on the various systems that this functionality interacts with has been significantly reduced.

But other tests showed little improvement and in two tests, our experience was actually a little better without the service pack installed than with it.

Bad News: The spyware/trojan horse functionality has been even more deeply integrated into the operating system. There are more systems than ever whose performance has been negatively affected by these assaults on the user.

At least there's some good news...

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

If anybody actually wants to undrstand what's been going on with Vista file copying, as opposed to making smart ass comments, there's an excellent article from Mark Russinovich's blog at:

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/02/04/2826167.aspx [technet.com]

Re:Vista SP2 is coming soon to the rescue...

Ah man, do I have to? The smart ass comments are more entertaining...

Real-world sp1 performance

"The Windows Vista SP1 install process clears the user-specific data that is used by Windows to optimize performance, which may make the system feel less responsive immediately after install. As the customer uses their SP1 PC, the system will be retrained over the course of a few hours or days and will return to the previous level of responsiveness." source [microsoft.com]

Any performance tests that haven't taken that into account somehow can't be taken too seriously sadly, it's a difficult thing to deal with for review, much like a fresh Vista original release, though at least SP1 shouldn't blank out your index system's index, and cause that to re-catalog everything too, that really would cripple immediate post-install tests.

You techies take the fall...

I for one am waiting until SP1SP1 comes out. I'm no early adopter.

Ahahaha

I'd love to see em get Vista in proper order, but damn it... All this wasted effort is damn funny... Slopping more junk isn't the answer... Maybe one of these service packs should start stripping away all the excess code. I mean c'mon, 27 minutes to install a collection of bug fixes? 3 reboots? Jesus... and that was on quad 6600. Ouch.

It should also be noted however he was testing the file transfer with a SD card, I would assume they behave similar to your standard USB flash drive and is generally either optimized for speedily transferring large files, or small files but rarely both...

One would think copying a Blue-Ray disc image across 2 hard drives would be more appropriate? Or at least using a standardized mix set of data, both files large and small. Word documents, mp3 files, disc images... But wait this is PC World... Not exactly at the forefront of reliable and unbiased testing...

Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements

In case anybody is interest *why* Vista pre-SP1 seemed so much slower copying files than XP, and why post-SP1 for the most part fixes it, you should check out Mark Russinovich's blog post [technet.com] on the matter.

It's a very interesting read.

Re:Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements

So, in reading that article, vista was slower primarily because they stopped using cached I/O. The explanation seems to be that file copies weren't actually any faster in XP they just *LOOKED* faster because they closed the copy dialog before the copy was actually completed (IE, the dialog closes when the file is completely read from the source, not when it is completely written to the destination).

In Vista they changed this so the dialog actually closed when the copy was complete, but now in SP1 they have gone back to the previous setup.

Re:Inside Vista SP1's File Copy Improvements

In Vista they changed this so the dialog actually closed when the copy was complete, but now in SP1 they have gone back to the previous setup.

This is not entirely accurate.

As Mark said, there were several problems with the XP model. The biggest problem being that large file copy operations could use up all the memory in the system. There were also scenarios where there as double-caching going on.

In Vista RTM, they completely did away with most cached i/o and increased the read/write sizes. This resulted in both a real and a perceived performance penalty for some local copy scenarios, but it dramatically improved network throughput and utilization.

In Vista SP1, they went back to doing *some* cached i/o in certain scenarios. So it's basically a blended approach. They also eliminated the double caching that sometimes took place.

O RLY?

Hm. That's funny... my personal tests conclude that my performance is better without Vista than with it.

Running Vista is a lot like trying to run a foot race in a swimming pool while wearing balls-and-chains on your feet. And then when you get to the end, a big fat lady grabs you out of the water and sits on your chest.

See, if you had just a little bit more beefy hardware, you'd barely even feel the chains.

Oh shoot it wasn't a car analogy.

Re:O RLY?

And then when you get to the end, a big fat lady grabs you out of the water and sits on your chest.

Oh, whew! That's a relief. I seriously thought that sentence was going to end with "face".

But it hasn't fixed DVD Maker

I've been running the SP1 Release Candidate for a while now and it has improved networking greatly (resuming from Sleep the network is available again immediately unlike pre SP1 where there was quite a lag), and on that front the network discovery and usage of my LAN is better than XP. (Machines are found more reliably and it all just works much more smoothly).

My biggest gripe with Vista has been the DVD Maker. I look upon OSX users with envy because of their iLife. I don't have HUGE needs for my digital media, but I would like to be able to throw one or more videos onto a DVD with a nice menu. I used to be able to do this without effort with Nero, but the version I have was an OEM that doesn't work with Vista.

So, I turned to what Vista has, and was thrilled to see DVD Maker, a simple program that seemed to do pretty much what I wanted and made really, really pretty menus with no hassle.

EXCEPT IT DOESN'T WORK.

I haven't had one successful DVD made using this dang thing.

I have tried burning DVDs with video taken straight from digital free to air tv (so already in DVD resolution and MPEG2 encoded), I've tried Divx files, I've tried everything. While you're creating the DVD in DVD Maker it shows EVERYTHING perfectly. If it burned the disc the way it SHOWED it in the program it'd all be fine... except what does it do?

One of two things:
* Fail with cryptic error at 99% of burn process (except it actually hasn't even touched the blank DVD)
OR
* Burn the disc successfully, but turn all widescreen material into squished 4:3 content... leaving only beautiful 16:9 menus working correctly.

It's utterly infuriating and is the only thing that has made me want a Mac really... just iLife... if I could have that on Windows I'd be happy.

I don't want to start a holy war here but...

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Vista fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista machine (a Quad core Xeon w/8 gigs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium 4 running XP SP2, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this machine, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Internet Explorer 7 will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even notepad is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various "Vista ready" machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Vista machine that has run faster than its XP counterpart, despite Vista's re-written core code. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 3.2ghz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim Vista is a superior OS.

Vista addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Vista over older faster, more stable XP.

Re:I don't want to start a holy war here but...

Whoa, a lot of people dont get this at all. Here's a hint. [kottke.org]

Vista already pulled from multicore boxen

We tried running Vista and it was, on average, twice as slow as XP, so we just gave up and won't install it on any boxen in our labs.

We have real work to do and shelling out cash for graphics cards we don't need for an OS that runs even slower is a total waste of time.

Most of our boxen are now Linux-only or Linux/XP dual boot now - performance matters, and making it only 45 percent slower than XP when it was 50 percent slower won't cut it in a production environment.

FILE Copying? Am I in the 80's?

How is this possible?

The best sales pitch for SP1 is that it COPIES FILES FASTER? Which is still probably slower than it was with XP, thus making it a non-improvement?

Ridiculous.

Re:9% cpopy speed-up noticable?

Exactly.

I mean, the slow copying speed when copying LARGE amounts of data sucks, but the WORST part of Vista is the slow copying speed when copying/moving small files. I mean, moving a file to the Recycle Bin takes 2 seconds! Copying a shortcut from one folder to another on the same drive takes 2 seconds! Those things should happen instantly, and DID happen instantly on XP, and every version of Windows before that.

That's where the performance problems really piss people off. A %9 improvement doesn't do squat.

Re:So...

Why bother with Cygwin when you can get that environment without all the Microsoft crap?

Re:So...

Why bother with computers when you can just go outside?

Re:So...

The outside has all those bugs, not to mention all that glare from the sun detracting from your enjoyment. It's just easier to stay inside and venture outside in a virtual world where you can kill the bugs with huge fireballs and fancy weapons. If I go out in the real outside with fancy weapons or fireballs, I'll get sent to an indoors where I can't use my computer to go to these cooler virtual worlds.