Vista SP1 (Leaked) - Analyzed
While we wouldn't advise you to use a leaked copy of anything, that doesn't mean we wouldn't want to give you some insight into the upcoming Vista SP1 - which, as most of you should know, has had a beta leaked to the Internet. APCMag took a close look at it, and found nothing earth-shattering (typical for most SPs, with the possible exception of XP SP2) - mostly bug fixes and performance enhancements.
I made it my mission this weekend to trawl through the registry and
file changes in SP1 to find out as best I could exactly what SP1 does.
First up, I can say that there is a very noticeable performance increase. It is obvious that since Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing, it has been optimising the code ever since. (I suspect this revelation will fuel the fires of the people who say Vista was released before it was ready for prime-time.) There’s far less hard drive thrashing and in general the system seems much smoother and more responsive.
Not that Vista is particularly slow on most up-to-date systems, but we could tell from the moment we loaded it that it was rushed out the door. KB937770 hotfix alone showed this, as it's something that caused systems we used to become annoyingly (to the point of wanted to hit something) slow when copying across a network - or even to an external drive.
So, Microsoft, let's get this one into "real" beta and out already.
