 A little more than a year ago, Windows Vista was finally brought to daylight in its final, official form. As XP was getting obsolete already (it had spent 5 years on the market as the dominating OS), a quick transition to the new operating system was expected. Yet besides the strong marketing campaign and hype, it simply never happened like that.
Alongside the new fancy interface and DirectX 10 support, Vista brought nothing new in the eyes of the ordinary user. A load of bugs, unacceptably high hardware requirements and a lot of unsupported hardware/software (the extreme example of this being Microsoft's own Fingerprint Reader, which claims Vista support on the packaging, but to this day has no 64-bit Vista drivers whatsoever) altogether made users frown at the option of migrating to Vista. With time, the situation improved, but not substantially, so Microsoft had to speed things up a little and introduce the first service pack for Vista, which should either remove or rectify the noticed problems to a certain extent.
The service pack itself contains all patches published by Microsoft by February 2008, as well as kernel corrections which should improve file and network performance substantially. Besides these easily noticeable mishaps, MS used its WER (Windows Error Reporting) system as a basis of which hardware/software doesn't work with Vista and why, so this type of corrections was also included in the service pack.
In December last year, the first Release Candidate of SP1 appeared. It mended some of the problems Vista had, but also reintroduced some other bugs. For example, although file copying was faster than before, the lagging was still noticeable if using Windows Explorer. The RC1 did not seem very promising, although the system did seem more “vital” with it. This can be blamed on the new bugs and problematic installations in some cases. Luckily, the final release of the SP1 has no issues of the sort – lagging is no longer there, and the file copying itself is now faster. The installation lasted for about 40 minutes and went very smoothly. It was instantly noticeable that the system was more responsive and pleasant to work with, and the application starting times also improved. Memory quantity was correctly displayed and we found no bugs from RC1 still present. No system settings are affected by the service pack, so you don't have to perform any additional tasks after the installation is complete.
We ran through some test simply in order to see whether SP1 brought along some actual performance improvements, paying special attention to results of tests in areas Microsoft claims were improved. We thus performed all file management and startup time tests on multiple occasions, just to make sure our results are credible. As you can see in the charts, MS really did improve networking greatly and file management to a lesser extent. We should mention that in one iteration, while copying files from one partition to another, we received poor results for unknown reasons, so the results are somewhat worse than on the pre-SP1 Vista system in this test battery. If these tests were disregarded, post-SP1 Vista would be better here as well. We also noted a large performance improvement in World in Conflict game in DirectX 9 mode. Other games were sometimes in favour of the SP1, occasionally not, but generally, there is not much impact on games solely based on SP1. It should also be mentioned that there might be some programs which will be limited in functionality or not work at all after SP1 installation, but 99% of these programs have received patches or entirely new version which support SP1.
All in all, SP1 met our expectations – some improvements are clearly visible to start with. However, Windows XP is still faster in some applications (games especially), so we continue to hope that the situation will improve both by further patches and newer driver versions from popular manufacturers. This would finally make Windows Vista a 100% stable, nice and attractive operating system we are all hoping for it to become.
| |
Vista (32 bit) |
Vista SP1 (32 bit) |
| Windows Performance Index |
5.4 |
5.5 |
Data copy
|
| Disk to disk [s]
(less is better) |
90.55 |
80.36 |
Partition to partition [s]
(less is better)
|
123.45 |
126.83 |
| From network to network [s]
(less is better) |
190,24 / 32,31 |
127,54 / 29,03 |
| Booting time [s]
(less is better) |
29.42 |
28.77 |
| DivX 6.8 [fps] |
167.75 |
162.71 |
| Sisoft Sandra |
| CPU Arithmetic ALU/iSSE3 |
33.089 / 28.396 |
32.964 / 28.385 |
| CPU Multimedia INT/FLOAT |
83.685 / 110.369 |
83.857 / 110.370 |
| Memory Bandwith INT/FLOAT [MB/s] |
4.384 / 4.382 |
5.167 / 5.169 |
| 3DMark 2005 CPU/GPU |
11.003 / 9.711 |
10.913 / 9.640 |
| WinRAR 3.71 [KB/s] |
458 |
485 |
| Cinebench 10 X-CPU |
6.639 |
6.518 |
| Company of Heroes 1024x768 |
| DX9 high noAA/noAF [fps] |
21,3 |
21,2 |
| DX10 high noAA/noAF [fps] |
21,3 |
20,6 |
| World in Conflict 1024x768 |
| DX9 medium noAA/noAF [fps] |
24 |
32 |
| DX10 medium noAA/noAF [fps] |
25 |
24 |
|
Software 
