Vista SP 1

Alright so this past weekend I was working on my Vista laptop, trying to get some homework done as a college student is ought to do on a Sunday afternoon, and I noticed that I had a new Windows Update available.  It just so happened that this update in particular was the much-anticipated Service Pack 1 for Vista, so I promptly installed it and I have to say if you were waiting for SP1 to get Vista I don’t really know why.  That’s not to say that SP1 isn’t a great addition to Vista, but there are no groundbreaking features or anything for people to get excited about.  What there is, however, are some under-the-hood performance boosts as well as a lot of fixes.

So if you’re familiar with Windows service packs at all, you know that the reason they’re so important is mostly that they offer a roll-up of all of the fixes that have occurred since the last service pack (or the launch of the operating system in Vista’s case).  What this means is that you can slipstream in all of the updates from the past year or 2 so that when you install Vista on your computer you have the bulk of the updates from the get-go.  This is great for easing bandwidth use so that you don’t have to download 5 gigabytes worth of updates when you first install.  Also back in the day when Internet speeds weren’t what they are today (the dial-up era I’m talking about) it could take hours if not days to download the mass of updates you would need for a fresh install of Windows.  The service pack side-steps the process of downloading all of those updates so that you only have to get maybe a few of the newest updates instead of every update ever released for the OS since its launch.

Now I started out by saying that there are no flashy additions to Vista found in the service pack but that’s okay.  The real reason most people like to wait until SP1 to jump into an operating system is the bug fixes.  Sure, any early adopter of Vista (myself?) has been getting these fixes in small increments over the past year and a half or so, but now a lot of the initial complaints about Vista have been fixed via patches and they’re all available in SP1.  Whether you were worried about driver support (that issue is still there by the way, just not nearly as big of a problem as when Vista launched) or buggy software you don’t have a whole lot to worry about anymore.

"But I haven’t gotten SP1 yet!  What’s the deal?"  Well trust me I feel your pain.  I have 2 Vista boxes, one desktop and one laptop, and I still have only received SP1 via automatic update on my laptop.  The reason for this is that SP1 has been a slow rollout, not just a "flip switch" update.  What I mean by that is that Microsoft is slowly releasing it out to Vista users instead of just making it available to everyone who uses Vista right off the bat.  There’s a few reasons for this, the most important of which is that there are still a handful of incompatibility problems with Vista software that need to be patched before SP1 can be installed.  If you’re running Vista on a new machine that you purchased with Vista installed on it and it’s Vista certified, chances are if you launch Windows Update you’ll be able to download and install SP1.  If you upgraded from a pre-existing machine, for example your old Windows XP machine, you might have to wait a bit longer.  Either way make sure you have all previous updates installed, including updates that are marked  ‘Recommended’ in Windows Update, because SP1 is only available once you have installed all of the updates that led up to it.  It’s important to install updates as soon as they come out either way because it secures your system.  Make sure you have automatic updates on, that Vista will automatically install ‘Recommended’ updates along with ‘Critical’ ones, and install all available updates.

For example on my laptop which has SP1 I had to install an Office 2007 service pack before I could install SP1.  On my desktop however, which is a computer I upgraded to Vista from XP (my laptop was purchased recently, is Vista certified, and came with Vista installed when I bought it), I still have not been able to download and install SP1 through Windows Update.  I think the main problem is that I might have failed to install some of the previous updates and so I obviously can’t get SP1 yet.  If you don’t want to use Windows Update by the way, you can always download Vista Service Pack 1 from Microsoft’s website.  Clicking here will send you to the download.

So that’s my Vista SP1 post.  I’m going to include a list below from Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows (http://www.winsupersite.com) website where he gives a great rundown of everything that you get in service pack 1.  Go ahead and check out his SP1 page (as well as his website in general, it’s great stuff) for more information.

Q: What features are included in Vista SP1?

A: The following end-user features are included in Windows Vista Service Pack 1:

1. A collection of previously-released and new security fixes, bug fixes, and other minor updates.

2. An update to the Windows kernel to bring the Vista kernel (version 6.0) up to date with the version in Windows Server 2008 (version 6.1).

3. A change to the Kernel Patch Protection ("PatchGuard") feature in the Vista kernel that prevents security companies like McAfee and Symantec from integrating as tightly with the OS as they could in previous Windows versions. This will include a set of APIs aimed at helping developers write code that interacts with this security feature.

4. A change to Vista’s Instant Search feature that will allow third party desktop search product makers to more closely integrate their products with Windows Vista. In the initial shipping version of Vista, the Instant Search indexer still runs at full speed even if a third party product is installed, reducing overall system performance.

5. A change to Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) that will remove the Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM) and Non-Genuine State (NGS) mode for Vista installs in expired non-activated and non-genuine states. See New WGA Behavior in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 for more information about this change.

Again, you can read the rest of Paul’s Vista Service Pack 1 rundown here.

Now Playing:
Christy Moore – Aisling
Army of Two, Puzzle Quest