With many organisations still shunning Windows Vista because of performance and compatibility issues, Sydney-based IT services company Dimension Data has successfully rolled out Service Pack 1 on a fleet of production environment notebook PCs.

DiData chief information officer Anthony Stevens says work began on the upgrade as soon as Microsoft released final code in early February. Initially it was trialled by a test group of 20 users, but after two weeks it was rolled out to 350 machines across the company.

Stevens says the upgrade, which would be seen by many companies to be risky at such an early stage, has gone smoothly with users immediately experiencing performance improvements. While admitting that the original version of Vista seemed “a bit flaky”, Stevens says SP1 brings with it noticeable improvements in stability.

“There are a bunch of things I’d call general user performance features that have been improved,” he says. “Long boot-up times and applications hanging when you alt/ tab between them are better, as is general systems stability when you are coming in and out of hibernation modes.”

Despite attracting considerable attention because of the early deployment, Stevens says it was not the thought of being the first cab off the rank that had been the motivating factor.

“Microsoft released Vista at the end of 2006 and, because we were rolling out a new laptop fleet at the same time, we decided we would deploy it,” he told IT Wire. “This put us in a good position when they started talking about SP1 in November last year as we were able to test every release until the final version.”

“The difference between the last release candidate and the final release was nothing that most people would notice. There were really only a couple of tweaks made by Microsoft.”