Microsoft must be feeling pretty confident that SP1 for Vista is moving in the right direction since on Wednesday they released SP1 RC Preview for download. I got a copy of it last evening and today burned the file to CD for installation.

One note: If you are using Vista SP1 beta, you must uninstall the beta before installing RC. Microsoft made note on their site that the RC Preview version is not an upgrade but a standalone release. So I booted up Vista and took off SP1 beta. However, I spent a few minutes trying to locate the file since Vista separates ‘programs’ from ‘updates’ that are installed on the system. But I finally located the service pack and removed it with no ill effects. That took about 30 minutes to get it off.

I should mention. As soon as I had taken off the SP1 beta software, my system went right back to the old slow boot and memory hog issues as before. My guess would be if I had checked on others issues, they would also be back as well. But I opted to just go ahead and install the RC.

On with Vista SP1 RC Preview install which took almost 85 minutes. During installation I noticed that there were some minor changes made to the install process itself. I believe these changes were in reference to user feedback that Microsoft received. But basically this is still a hands off experience. There is minimal user intervention.

Once the installation was completed, there were some additional hardware updates for my system which were installed as well. After everything was completed it was back to the faster boots and less memory usage. Also the network transfers were similar in performance to XP.

For the remainder of the day I experienced no problems. I’ll be reporting back later as I continue to use the RC Preview.

Comments welcome.

Tags: vista, service pack 1, rc preview, install, review,