A Peek Inside Vista Service Pack 1

Vista Service Pack 1, where is the XP service pack3 were suppose to see?

The reduction in CPU utilization and general speeding up of things will be most welcome.  

I read the following article and thought I would include it as part of this discussion.
Article by Paul Thurrott, [email protected]

Finally, Microsoft Reveals Vista SP1 and XP SP3 Schedules

Yesterday, Microsoft finally disclosed the timing and content of
Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3, two eagerly awaited OS updates
that were previously shrouded in mystery. The company says that
neither update will include any major new end user functionality,
especially in the case of Vista SP1, as that OS brings a new form of
servicing in which updates are released as needed, and not all at once
in a service pack.

"Windows Vista SP1 beta will be released in a few weeks to a moderate
sized audience," a Microsoft representative told me. "At this time,
SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability
and performance issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding
support for several emerging standards. Microsoft is targeting first
quarter of 2008 for Windows Vista SP1."

The Vista SP1 beta will proceed in stages, and the audience for the
beta will grow with each stage. Currently, a very small group of
testers are evaluating an early version of SP1 code. That group will
grow larger in a few weeks, and then a later pre-release version of
SP1 will be available to a larger group of testers via MSDN and
TechNet subscriptions, Microsoft says.

Microsoft would prefer that its business customers, especially, not
wait until Vista SP1 before deploying Vista. As I first reported quite
a while ago, Microsoft plans to ship Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008
at the same time; the company finally corroborated this information in
this week's announcement.

The XP SP3 release is due in the first half of 2008 and will also be a
minor update. "Windows XP SP3 is a rollup of previously released
updates for Windows XP including security updates, out-of-band
releases, and hotfixes," said a Microsoft representative. "It will
also contain a small number of new updates. This should not
significantly change the Windows XP experience." Microsoft has yet to
reveal what these new updates are.

Win2k made it as far as SP4 (and an update rollup pkg), XP made it as far as SP3, Vista will probably get as far as SP2 and it's replacement will be released by then as well.

I was participating in a discussion on techrepublic's website about companies that are waiting for Vista SP1 before deploying the Vista OS to their user base. My question is what real advantages (aside from improved GUI) does Vista offer over XP to merit changing over to the new OS?

UncleRob you should try using it and you will find the answer to your question. It really depends on what your requirements are. However without desiring to do more, and to do it more efficiently, more safely, and with more fun and enjoyment makes it harder to see the value of upgrading.

I am enjoying using Vista over XP, and will cry to have to go back - I still see much room for improvement in computing and in technology in general - but enjoy to see it moving forward as I have come to understand the engineering diffculties encountered along the way. There is much plumbing work that is part of Vista, and it is a good all in one package. Its certainly an evolving platform for application developers, and once there are more cool apps (e.g. some Stardock apps) releaseed and the improved hardware becomes more accessable you will find that Vista will increase its gap from XP. If price is not an issue the choice should be obvious. When thousands of developers and testers are working much more than 40 hours a week, some progress must happen - unless we are all idiots.

That's a great improvement for the user but what is the incentive for a large company to upgrade it's user base from windows xp to windows vista.

Alot of users experienced that their vista machine's performance wasn't up to par with their previous winxp machine - if you upgrade your vista machine with more memory & faster harddrive along with other components (cpu, video card, etc.) then you can expect performance on your vista machine will match the performance you experienced on your xp machine.

Don't get me wrong, I love the vista gui interface (I love it alot!), but is that all we're upgrading for? A gui update?

Dude of course not - Have you not read about Bitlocker? Have you not read about the number of improvements in Networking - the new network connections GUI, improved stack, improved wireless management, IPsec + AuthIP + Firewall, Network Access Protection, VPN etc. What about folder synchronization - I really love this one. Integrated search - this with Office 2007 has been a mojor productivity boost for me. Remote Desktop improvements. Rock solid 64 bit support. Memory optimizations and security. And tons more but I am just writing out quickly what stuff I have found useful of the top of my head, and from an end user perspective. I'm not big into enterainment and media (I play games and have a Urge subscription) but I believe there are tons of changes in this regard like DRM, HD-DVD, etc. If you add in the platform SDK and other developer tools from MS there is tons of exiting things going on with and around the latest OS. If you only use your computer to surf the net and read email - then you might as well stick what you already have, whatever that may be.

BTW, there are tons more that can be done regarding the GUI. I like the infrastructure improvements but there are simply quality issues that still need to be addressed. Just from design stand point I see tons of improvement in the area of Multimon.

Hi unclerob    I'm just an enthusiastic home user so I can't speak on what businesses might get out of an upgrade but from an amateurs point of view I see a whole heap of new stuff in Vista Home Premium which I didn't have on XP home.
For example,If I wanted a photo viewer I used to need Picasa or FastStone,both of which I enjoyed using but now I have Windows photo Gallery.
Previously,rather than use the hopelesly outdated Outlook Express I would use Thunderbird,which again I rated very highly,but now I have Windows Mail.
If I wanted a calendar/organiser I needed Sunbird or the Lightning plugin,now I have Windows Calendar.
The list continues..Windows Contacts,Windows Movie Maker,Windows DVD Maker and even Windows Media Centre.
The security is really beefed up too which is also quite pleasing.
You're right,the user interface is obviously a real selling point but there is plenty of substance once the vaneer is scratched away.
It's the first time I've had a new operating system from near to when it was released (I got XP about a year after release)so I guess there is a certain ammount of novelty value attached to my enthusiasm for vista at the moment,but I'm sure you would get plenty from it and lets face it,it will only get better.
  

Hi Greenskid, to clarify a little further my questions really aren't focused on the home user, it's pretty much understood that people buying new home desktop pc's will have one of the available vista flavors installed on that machine by default. The improvements you mention in network config & setup, ipsec, authip,firewall,nap, vpn, etc. aren't issues the normal corporate desktop pc user is ever going to have to deal with either - those improvements only benefit (possibly) the PC LAN technicians & Network/System Admins since those types of settings are locked and available only to users with admin privileges so that doesn't benefit the corp.desktop user. Folder syncronization tools have been around before Vista so that isn't a big selling feature either as well as desktop search tools that integrate with office suites (copernicus, google, yahoo, msn, etc). Remote desktop connectivity works just fine as is Windows XP, I'm not sure how much of an improvement is going to be seen here plus I tend to use third party tools for this feature as well which I likely won't drop. As far as memory optimization, desktops running Vista vs. WinXP will like require twice as much memory to run the operating system adequately so I don't know if you can accurately call that memory optimization. If companies currently employ sound security procedures & practices regarding their corp. networks & winxp users, security really can't much of a selling feature with Vista. Locking down users in Windows XP as restricted user account types pretty much nullifies any spyware & virus threat, including MS Defender with Vista doesn't make me feel anymore secure with protecting me from spyware when it catches at best 50% of the available spyware that can infect your machine when compared against other spyware removal tools. UAC appears to be a nightmare from what I can see (hopefully to be fixed in the SP1 release) and I've seen that users running Vista without admin privileges aren't able to postpone reboots due to automatically installed windows updates - a definite negative for users who are in the middle of time sensitive meetings/projects, etc. Since when does the operating system get to decide when to reboot itself?

Don't get me wrong, I'm a definite fan of new Vista interface - it's the nicest looking version of Windows to date as far as I'm concerned and as a home user running both vista & xp machines, I definitely don't mind working my vista machine. There are alot of improvements and included applications that many home users will take advantage of, myself included.

My question really was what the main benefits & incentives for large corporations to rollout corp wide vista os installs for their user base when you have to take into account the required vista skill set training for your employees, upgrade & replace existing hardware to allow for the new os installs, developing & implementing new methods of desktop imaging & os deployment, testing to determine which in-house applications will work/not work under the new vista os, etc. etc. Upgrading technology for the sake of upgrading technology can't be the only driving factor plus we can expect shorter lifespans from windows operating systems in the future as per Microsoft which wants to develop & release newer operating systems within shorter periods of time - why not wait for next windows os and skip Vista altogether? SP1 has just been released and Vista itself only became publicly available several months ago, you can expect Vista SP2 to come out sometime near the end of 2008 - a logical assumption given that microsoft wants to speed up operating system development.

On a side note, you mentioned Office 2007 and I'll be testing it out myself pretty soon, but I recently tried to open up a Word 2007 document on my winxp machine running Off2k3/Word 2003 and that didn't work - I was prompted to download a sizeable update from Microsoft to allow for this and even after that installation the document didn't appear to be formatted correctly and contained some garbage/superfluous text at the bottom of the document leading me to believe that the conversion wasn't a perfect process (it wasn't). Aside from the new off2k7 ribbon interface which does look very nice, I can't see why existing users would want to upgrade to off2k7 from off2k3?

I tend to be very cautious and that's probably why I'm a little hesitant in quickly adopting Vista at our company. The sales pitch just isn't strong enough yet to convince me to switch over.

You did not say anything about BitLocker - remember the number reports of sensitive data that was compromised due to lost/stolen laptops? Bitlocker to the rescure. The Mobility Center is also nifty addition for laptop users. There is Windows Meeting Space which builds upon the new p2p networking infrastructure that seemslessly handles NAT traversal using IPv6/v4 tunneling. The list of goes on and on if you look for it.

For use in coporations I feel that management of company resources is a big deal. Windows Vista + Windows Server 2008 provides a lot of enhancements to ease management and improve overall security. Yes, a employee in a coporation running Vista will not know of all the new stuff happening in the background that is saving the company tons of money... and that is the aim - they should happly continue doing their job specific stuff with less apprehension that they will loose their data or have it compromised while communicating with others. Have you tried out the file history/version support built into Vista? BTW the synchronization support is really built upon a great addition to the file system - Windows Vista finally exposes symlinks and it is accessable via commandline too - I loved this feature on Linux. It is used on Vista for application compatibility. Anyway let me just say if you are geek then there is depth in Vista - the search functionality in Vista is much deeper than the search apps for XP by virtue of its integration into explorer, and the start menu - all a user has to do is try typing there, and voila they seemlessly discover the power.