Vista Service Pack One Almost Here

arogier writes "After numerous delays and an actual release reversal, the official release date for Vista service pack one has been set for Tuesday, March 18th on Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads. It will be released as an automatic update on April 18th. 'It's unclear so far how a February snafu will affect SP1's roll-out. Last month, after Microsoft pushed a pair of prerequisite patches to users, some reported that their machines refused to finish installing one of the fixes, then went into an endless series of reboots. Several days later, Microsoft pulled the update from automatic delivery, said it was working on a solution and promised it would "make the update available again shortly after we address the issue."' It would be a good time for those planning to adopt early to perform requisite backups and locate their restore media."

I got the, er, "early adopter" version.

Great news, but it doesn't matter to me anymore. I already pirated it from bittorrent. Read that again. I was so desperate to make it work I had to STEAL FIXES for an operating system I LEGALLY BOUGHT. Says a lot about Vista, doesn't it.

Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version.

It's more like ordering a meal, then complaining that they DID immediately bring you the uncooked ingredients, hoping that they'll have time to cook it for the people who order later.

-:sigma.SB

Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version.

Not quite, a better analogy might be that it's like going to restaurant and recieving a mediocre and unsatisfying starter and main course and when it comes to pudding being told that the pudding isn't ready yet and if they were to serve it to you immediately you might get ill and die. Nevertheless even hearing this advice you then break into the kitchen and gobble down the partially cooked pudding rather than taking the perfectly sensible option of going to the lovely homely Penguin tavern next door where they're serving wholesome, nutritious and filling meals for nothing, and with free beer.

Re:I got the, er, "early adopter" version.

No problem.

Imagine if a car goes to a restaurant and having waited ages for it's meal is disappointed when the starter and main course arrive and are foul tasting and inadequate for a car of his appetite ...

Updates? Ha!

though at least they still have updates coming through Windows Update

I applied one of the updates (KB944533) and it killed http. Internet explorer would not open up web pages, but would give the "server could not be reached" error. I was able to ping just fine, and I could reach the page from another computer on the same network. The kicker was that the patch not only knocked out IE, but Firefox as well. Things worked fine after uninstalling the patch. Of course, the patch got re-installed the very next day.

Yesterday I decided to install some more patches, hoping that they would remedy the bug in KB944533. Nope! In fact, the DHCP client stopped working. I could no longer get anything but APIPA addresses. I uninstalled those patches, hoping to recover, but no dice. I decided to roll back the machine about two weeks, and now it blue screens.

Now Microsoft isn't the only culprit. A language pack update in Ubuntu is killing a number of my KDE apps (k3b in particular). So I have two machines that I have to run unpatched operating systems on, because patching them causes them to not work. At least I have a choice to ignore the patch with Ubuntu. Windows applies the patches without asking.

Re:Updates? Ha!

The common component to all those failures is you.

Re:Updates? Ha!

I applied one of the updates (KB944533) and it killed http. Internet explorer would not open up web pages, but would give the "server could not be reached" error. I was able to ping just fine, and I could reach the page from another computer on the same network. The kicker was that the patch not only knocked out IE, but Firefox as well. Things worked fine after uninstalling the patch. Of course, the patch got re-installed the very next day.

On our small company LAN I encountered a similar problem but with a stock install of Vista on about 3 newly purchased laptops. The problem turned out to be the fact that our LAN uses a firewall/router and connects to ADSL which requires a lower MTU, and Vista has the MTU fixed at 1500. Lowering it to 1492 (manually - via the command line no less!) on the laptops made the difference.

Now, we could browse some sites but not others. The amazing thing was most of the Microsoft sites (like msn.com, Hotmail, etc.) wouldn't work but competing services would. Strange brew. :)

Moment of truth...

Now to see how many "I'll wait for SP1 before moving to Vista" people actually follow through.

Re:Moment of truth...

I am probably the only one on slashdot who uses Vista AND likes it. I have had exactly 1 issue with vista since I got it in Jan. 2007, that was a missing driver, which appeared on vendor site Feb. 2007 (webcam). So personally I can't see why everyone is slamming it so much. I will never go back to XP. ( this is not ment as a troll post, im just saying what i think of it.)

Re:

I don't have any issues with Vista. It and other programs crash just as often in Vista as they did in XP. But my problem with Vista is not that it has issues, its that I have to completely overhaul my workflow which I've been using since Windows 95 (and im

It's faster

Having bought a new Dell laptop with Vista on that's lower spec than my work machine (policy is to update desktops later this year), my laptop almost always feels far more responsive.

Plus, there's other unsung stuff in Vista i've not seen in any OS - the problem solutions centre (not sure exactly how to translate into English); when I got it I had my one and only BSOD in Vista. Shocked, I rebooted and as soon as I was back to the desktop Windows pops up a message saying "I see something real bad happened; do you mind if I see if there's a solution online?". Click Yes, comes back saying "Ah I crashed because of this driver; there's a update to it here which will fix the problem". It's never happened since.

So yeah, there's reasons Vista is better. UAC is top too; I like to know when a program is gonna try and change my system (some try that you'd never think would - denied).

It's an upgrade without a doubt. I wouldn't pay specifically to upgrade mind you, but I appreciate the changes as they come anyway.

Re:It's faster

I'm using Vista on a brand new Dell XPS. But the problem solution center didn't help me in any case. I had 3 BSODs so far (since mid Januari 2008), and the solution center thingy never gave a usable information. So I've stopped using that thing.

As for UAC, I've put that into silent mode because it annoyed the hell out of me. I know it's meant to be obstructive. But I need to use a couple of legacy applications. The UAC blackout thingy actually wrecks havoc with multi screen setups and DirectDraw applications. Or at least, it did for me. It would have been nice if it didn't nag me every time I started an application which I pre-configured to be run in administrative mode. That would at least solve some of the problems I have with UAC.

Re:Vista is much slower

Most likely, your old machine had accumulated crap over time, and resinstalling XP would have given an even larger speedup.

Most likely it's stuff like SuperFetch in Vista doing what it's designed to do in fact. For once I've got an OS that's gonna use the memory i bought with the machine. That's what it's designed for, and it does it very well. FireFox opens faster than IE6 does in any XP machine; fresh or otherwise. Believe me, Vista is faster if you have the memory.
And all the palava about Areo grinding systems down is rubbish too; it's all 3d accelerated (read: using hardware features otherwise doing nowt), so that too has no effect of performance. Feels very snappy in fact, especially with SP1 which i've been running for a couple of weeks now - it's the Vista that should've shipped.
There are some things i don't like about Vista of course; the dumbed down explorer for one, and the higher memory requirements for another, but it does load stuff faster than XP, no doubt.

Re:Moment of truth...

A simple example is the new explorer thing. It no longer has a drop down box with all the parent directories, it shows some kind of history.

This is one of those things that you really have to spend time with and adust too, because in actual fact, Vista really improved on this.

If you click on the 'location bar' or whatever its called, it shows you the current path, eg. c:\users\documents\whatver... and has a history drop down of the last several folders. I agree this is sort of lame. There is also a back/forward button which behaves as it would in a browser; and the back/forward buttons aren't all that bad.

But the real magic is when you have a folder/file in one of the lower panes (left or right) selected, then the location bar displayes a sort of breadcrumb view.
eg: [myname] > documents > whatever >

clicking on the myname / documents / whatever will take you directly to that folder. So that's our up button. Not only is there a button that goes 'up one level', but you can also usually go up 2 or 3 or more levels directly.

On top of that clicking on the '>' bring drop down lists of the folders within that folder... so if I'm in 'whatever', and I click the '>' next to 'myname' I get a list of the subfolders of myname... so without leaving where I am, with 2 clicks I can navigate directly to an 'uncle folder' (alternate child of the parent of the parent). You gotta admit that's pretty slick.

So we've got easy navigation up one, two, three, or even more levels, as well as directly into the children of any those levels.

Backspace no longer goes to the parent directory.

Its now: alt-uparrow

That's not so bad.

Frankly, compared to most file explorers I've used including Mac OSX's finder and Windows XP, Vista's is pretty good - once you take the time to learn its quirks and shortcuts.

it doesn't allow be to customize the layout and remove all useless elements. Like the favorite folders, I don't need it, just show be the directory tree.

Under [username]/favorites/links you can easily customize / remove any links you find useless, or replace them with ones you'd find useful (as I've done). Unfortunately if you remove all of them its not smart enough to suppress the section entirely; I imagine there's a registry hack for that, but really, in my case a link to documents, desktop, and a couple project folders is actually pretty useful are actually really useful, so I'm actually glad to have them there. And I got rid of the searches, music, and pictures crud.

I also needed to hack the registry just so that explorer will keep using list view for all explorer windows (dumb directory profiles).

Actually, there is a checkbox under Tools -> Folder Options -> Remember Each Folders View Settings

If you uncheck that, it pretty much disables the 'directory profiles' you are talking about, if I understood you right. You shouldn't need to 'hack the registry'.

But it all boils down to a single question: why would you exchange your XP for Vista?
So far I haven't found anything.

I think for most people that's a fair assessment. But when you buy new hardware, unless there is a specific compatibility reason to get XP I'd recommend vista over xp nearly any day.

Re:No there's plenty

Of the people I know that have mostly bad things to say about Vista, I'd say at least 90% have never actually used it. They "Read about it somewhere," or "Some guy they know told them," and so on. They have no experience with it, other than perhaps having seen it on a computer. They are simply repeating stories. Of those that have used it and dislike it, almost all of them actually have an issue with something else, that they are blaming on Vista. For example a coworker was pissed because his DJ hardware/software combo didn't work. Ok, well check compatibility first, and that isn't a Vista issue. It doesn't support Linux either.

I'll ignore the fact that you are doing exactly what you accuse others by repeating hearsay and address the "it doesn't work on Linux either" remark. That would be valid if it ever did in the first place which it didn't. Let's compare apples to apples here. Vista's main competition isn't Linux or OS X even. It is XP. In that context, the program does work in XP and not in vista. It sure is a Vista issue. Say what you like, but that sounds like a Vista sale lost if that is the driving factor for switching for that user.

Another problem is people who try to run it on insufficient hardware. This happens with basically every Windows release that I can remember. I remember all the complaints that Windows 95 didn't run well on 4MB of RAM, even though that was the minimum. The response was, of course, yes that's the MINIMUM, not the "gets good performance" amount. Same deal with Vista, people have old systems with insufficient hardware, particularly RAM (since not that long ago RAM was real pricey). They install Vista and find it doesn't perform well, and thus get angry.

Umm....No! They were SOLD on the fact that the NEW machine they bought was "Vista capable" from the get-go when it wasn't. Hence the class action lawsuit. Bait and switch is still illegal in the US at least until the Microsoft lobbyists pay off, er, "contribute to" Congress to change it. There is a big difference between buying a new machine based on the word of the supplier that it will work fine with the new OS and buying an upgrade where it is anybody's guess. That is the difference here.

Re:No there's plenty

"The reason people slam it so much here is because they badly want it to fail. It is predominantly FUD."

Sorry, that's not quite right. I have a negative view about Vista because, having had to install it on a laptop so I can support some of my user base that have Vista, I have had:

1) The laptop screen saver not waking up *sometimes* and so I have to toggle the laptop in and out of standby to carry on working.
2) A wifi driver that blue screens *sometimes* on resuming from standby so if 1) happens I may lose my work in progress.
3) A damn stupid box that pops up every time I run notepad++ warning me about the program.
4) Mysterious periods of disk thrashing.
5) Mysterious periods of wifi not connecting.
6) A need to buy 1GB more RAM to make the thing stop plodding.
7) RDP sessions mysteriously failing and needing a registry key deleted to get things going again

Now, I am sure some of these things are fixable with some tweaking or with some patching, and perhaps the wifi issue is down to the chipset company, but the number of hoops my users I have had to go through to make simple things work is extraordinary and timewasting. Unlike XP (or 2000 or NT), rarely has Vista been an 'out of the box' solution to a new install.

I am very pragmatic when it comes to Vista, but quite simply if you put identical machines running Vista and XP side by side (OK, let's give Vista some more RAM to start) and use them both for a short while, my money's on Vista being more of a PITA to use and less easy to navigate: things that took a few clicks to get to are now buried and we have had to wait for revised or new beta versions of some apps just to get some things going. Some users were on Office 2002 - but Outlook has problems with that so we have had to pay to upgrade some, while others have been moved to a Scalix pilot system.

Sure, Vista is not a train wreck, but it's a bloody big detour on the road to efficient computing with many rough edges and a cost loading. I know it will get better over time, but when it hit the ground running it was still getting dressed and keeps tripping over its pants.

Re:Moment of truth...

Now to see how many "I'll wait for SP1 before moving to Vista" people actually follow through.

That was, they'll wait for SP1 to pass judgment. Not wait for SP1 then blindly buy.

Backup - but do backups work properly yet?

I believe there is/was a shadow volume copy problem with Vista that prevented complete backups. If shadow volume copy does not work you will not be able to back things up like the registry. Either way a complete disk image will work since you do it from outside of the OS. This can be done with "partimage" on knoppix for free or Acronis and various others for a nicer UI.

Somehow...

... I can't help but pity those poor Vista users. What should be simply the release of a patch has become a major "event" which people actually have to prepare for and which, from what I hear, is even causing something quite similar to mild panic. But then again, you do get great DRM for your troubles.

Re:Somehow...

... I can't help but pity those poor Vista users. What should be simply the release of a patch has become a major "event" which people actually have to prepare for and which, from what I hear, is even causing something quite similar to mild panic. But then again, you do get great DRM for your troubles.

I don't have mod points, so bring on the Flame bait mods. What do you call the Mac OS distribution system? Updates or epiphanies.

I just want an accurate frame for your post, Mac troll or Linux user.

Re:Somehow...

Random stuff does not break. Look at the emergency patching and releasing of the kernel that all distros had to go through a while back to fix the VM splice bug.

All those distros managed to push a replacement kernel in a matter of hours/days that did not adversely affect user systems that I could tell.

Likewise, this patch of an operating system that you pay for ought to work as smoothly as the free one. I'm not really sure how comparable the two are, but it is interesting that the linux distros were able to pull a hot fix like that without too much user consternation.

Re:Somehow...

And this is different from a new kernel version how?

One big difference is that the Linux kernel (which is the one you mean, I presume) is usually updated in much smaller increments which means that every single update has less chance of breaking things. Another big difference is that kernel updates only update the kernel, not X, KDE/Gnome/whatever and all those programs which your system won't run without. These are updated separately which, again, means that there's less chance of breaking things.

No comment.

I won't comment on the DRM because it really isn't as serious as a lot of Slashdotters think.

I won't respond to your comment, but DRM is BUILT-IN to the Operating System. How much more serious can it get?

Rock and hard place.

One thing is for certain..

..after the initial release then pull, the bricked PCs, the host of security issues and the whole general fuck up that MS have done over vista so far I predict a cautious, "if I must", approach from sys admins with every possible protection and back-up in place. This is not going to be a stampede for the latest secure patches. Truly MS has been a shot in the foot release for them.

Second the poster higher up: it will sure be interested to see how many of the wait for SP1 adopters now follow through and adopt.

Given the general widely held feeling about the the superiority of XP over Vista I cannot see many people clamoring to do so. But on the flip argument MS will withdraw XP soon to try and force adoption of Vista - this would leave many potential customers between a brick and a hard place.

No bother to me - I've been linux only at home for ~8 years (so I guess I'm biased) - but we sure live in interesting times.

Vista slipstreamed with SP1

If your interested in downloading and installing a fresh copy of Vista with SP1 integrated, be sure to hunt down the ISO (provided by MSDN).

File Name: en_windows_vista_with_service_pack_1_x86_dvd_x14-29594.iso
File Size: 2943MB
MD5: b09267740ddd1a08d80b04ec6bbc232a
SHA1: bcd715a02739809e477c726ae4b5caa914156429

So far, I've noticed a fast improvement with Disk IO performance with SP1. I think I'm going to take Vista for another spin now that it feels "faster". It's still a memory hog however. I'd recommend 2GB or 1GB at the very least.