I work in the IT field which means I'm able to get my hands on samples and pre-release products for review and testing. Today I installed the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (Release Candidate). The final version is scheduled for public release around February 2008.
First to answer the question that a lot of you are wondering: Why did I upgrade to Vista to being with? The reason is simply that around 9 months ago my old PC died, so I went a bought a new PC which, of course, came pre-installed with Vista.
PC Information:
HP m7750n
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2.6 GHz
2 GB Ram
366 GB Hard Drive
Over the months I have had very few good things to say about Vista. The OS, as a whole, has been all around very flakey and odd in behavior. It isn't as if the system crashes while I'm in the middle of a long important document, instead it has done all sorts of very small and annoying things. I would describe it as being similar to the Chinese water torture. It drips and drips and drips and drips all sorts of small annoying things the whole time I'm using it.
A few of the most annoying things Vista has been doing is to load the web browser (IE7) very slowly and while it is loading the scroll-bar freezes preventing me from scrolling up and down until the page has finished loading. Exasperating!!! Another small thing that has driven me NUTS is how the window drag-and-drop has a lag to it. When I would move a window it has behaved as if it was connected to the mouse via a rubber band. Over the months I could literally "sling" windows around on the screen like the ball connected to the paddle-ball toy for kids. That always drove me NUTS!
I also had to give up a lot of my hardware peripherals because there simply have not been any drivers for them. The first one I noticed was my web cam. The Internet has been deprived of seeing me for over NINE months!
There is also the User Account Control. This is the safety feature that prevents malicious software from hijacking your computer. The User Account Control has been a pain in the ass from day one because most of the software I had did not quite work with it. Over the months I have received a slow trickle of software updates from my software vendors to fix this problems. In terms of usability, the User Account Control pop-up window has been slow in popping up and slow in response to my clicks. This extra bit of time, especially while already being stressed while troubleshooting system settings, has been a major pain and exasperation.
I have saved the best for last... the #1 thing that has seriously annoyed me was the way the Sleep mode has not worked. I want to conserve energy by keeping my system in Sleep / Hibernate mode while I'm not using it. The main problem has been that the system will almost always do one of two things: It will go to sleep, but then spontaneously wake up on its own for no apparent reason, and then will not go back to sleep. The second, even more annoying thing is that if it does go to sleep, odds are it will never wake up again. It falls into a coma and the only way to wake it back up is to pull the power plug and do a hard reboot.
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Begin the review of the new Service Pack 1 - Release Candidate
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First of all: regarding the install of the Service Pack, it is very easy and the download was only about 436 MB - not bad for a Service Pack. I ran a single executable and it said it might take a few hours and several reboots. My first worry was that I would going to have to baby sit all of the reboots, but to my delight I was able to walk away from the install and come back to a finished install. Apparently it handled the multiple reboots with the system account instead of my personal account. Bottom line: Install was clean, easy to do and pain free.
So far the overall performance has gone up noticeably. Windows explorer opens much faster and browsing files on my system is much quicker (and enjoyable) as I am not having to wait for the system to catch up to my clicks. Also no more rubber band windows and the browser loads MUCH more quickly without freezing the scroll bar.
The User Account Control, while still there, appears and goes away MUCH more quickly. I can click through it much more quickly than before. Granted, it is still a pain in the ass, but at least it goes away far more quickly now.
The main thing I plan on testing very thoroughly over the next few weeks is the Sleep mode. In fact I will be placing my system in Sleep mode before I go to bed tonight so I can watch what it does in the morning. I have been fooled by my system before: I would install a hot-fix for the sleep issue, noticed it worked for a day or two, but then it would start to fail again. I'm going to really nail this feature over a few weeks and watch it very closely to see if it really does work correctly.
I welcome comments from others who have installed Vista SP1