I m happy to report that SP1 really has improved the performance on my Vista Ultimate system. The performance is not so much about the system operating faster, but that it is now equal to the performance of XP.

Some examples.

Deleting files was slow before SP1 beta. I’m talking pokey slow. No more. It is just like XP now. Delete and gone. Same with the recycle bin. Zap and gone.

Networking improvements. Previously when you tried to transfer files across the network it was molasses slow. Gone. Now the files transfers just like they do in XP.

Coming out of Hibernation or Sleep mode has been improved and seems to be a bit faster and yes, more like XP.
Other features are:

Create a recovery disk. For those of you who didn’t get a Vista disk with your system, Microsoft now has included a utility to create a recovery disk.

Disk defrag. The option has been added to select which volume to defrag.

This is strange. Microsoft has changed the terminology on their Vista Extra screen page. From cutting edge technology and services to plain vanilla updates. This is going to be a real sore spot for those who plunked out their dollars expecting that Microsoft was going to offer users innovative technology. Looks like Microsoft is doing a quick back peddle. Ultimate should be renamed DULLimate.

The sorta bad:

I received an email this AM from another tester who asked me to try an experiment. He asked that I try and move a large number of files to see if I experienced an out of memory message. He stated that this was a known issues in Vista and didn’t seem to be fixed in SP1 beta.

My wife is a pack rat. In her My Doc’s she has 25,862 files, in 152 folders totaling some 973+ MB. I burned everything onto a DVD using Nero with her system using XP Media Center Edition. This is Gateway laptop with a AMD 1.8 Ghz Turion 64 with 512 MB of memory. Copying the files over to Nero to be burnt took about 4 minutes. The burning process took another 11 minutes since I dropped the write speed down to 4X to get a good burn. I immediately took out the DVD and than copied her entire My Doc’s folder into a new folder which took another 4 minutes. During this entire time everything worked perfectly.

Over to my Vista desktop box. This is a AMD 2.8Ghz with 2GB physical RAM and 2GB using Ready Boost. I used the Send To command to copy everything from the DVD over to the Documents folder which took about 9 minutes. I than turned around and copied the Documents folder over to a new folder which took 6 minutes. No out of error message but I did notice something while doing these procedures. I have a Gadget that measures memory on the system. I don’t know how accurate it is but it provides some info on how much memory is being used. Before the file transfers it showed available 1,479 MB of 2044 MB with 543MB used. After the file transfer it showed 779MB being used. At first I thought the memory was not being released as reported by others. I left the system and came back about an hour later and saw that the memory had return fairly close to where it was before the transfer with 548MB being used.

As a final experiment I copied all the files and folders mentioned above from my wife’s system over to my Vista system without a hitch. Go figure.

I did send my friend the link for a fix that Microsoft has posted found here.

It doesn’t appear that this problem affects every Vista system.

Observation:

I wonder if we will ever see PowerToys for Vista?

Comments welcome.

[tags]microsoft, windows, vista, SP1 beta, [/tags]