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.

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.