Yesterday I posted a small rant about not being able to talk about Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 beta, to which I must apologize, since I misunderstood what the NDA [Non Disclosure Agreement] covered. I contacted my MVP lead who stated that the only part that NDA covered was the information contained in the original message I had received concerning the upgrade, but that I was free to share my thoughts about SP1 beta.

First of all I chose to download the complete package from the Microsoft download site which is 687.36 MB for the 5 language pack that included English. The servers were running very well and the download was completed in less than 30 minutes. I burned the file to CD to install on my Vista box running the Ultimate version. The installation proceeded smoothly except for one small unnerving issue that I wasn’t prepared for. The system rebooted 4 times to complete the installation. Each time that I thought the system would boot into Vista, up popped a warning that the service pack was installing, not to shut off the computer and a restart would be needed. OK. I must admit I at first thought that something was wrong. But all was well and my system booted normally.

At first boot after the install a screen popped up asking if I would like to update the drivers for my wireless network card and also my NVidia video card to which I answered yes. After that was completed the system seemed to be working well with no ill affects. So I did a shutdown and restarted. Shutdown time and boot time have been vastly improved. By how much? I would have to venture a guess and say by about 25%. So far, so good.

Next I checked all of my applications and everything worked just fine. I noted no issues.

Next I’m going to concentrate on performance issues and see how file transfer has been improved. Previously transferring files over a network has been extremely slow.

Comments welcome.

[tags]vista, sp1, beta,windows,microsoft, improvements, [/tags]