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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Windows XP SP3: Beware the service pack!
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Windows XP SP3: Beware the service pack! | Windows XP SP3: Beware the service pack! |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Thursday, 08 May 2008 | |
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Naturally I knew about the problems that Microsoft had been having delivering Vista SP1 - we had written enough about the subject here at iTWire. Yet, even though I was quite happy with the performance and stability of my Vista installation, I allowed myself to be convinced that SP 1 would be even more stable and significantly faster, making better use of memory swapping to and from disk. The first thing that happened after installing Vista SP1 is that it broke my HP printer driver. That wasn't too bad, I fixed that quite easily by uninstalling the driver and doing a clean reinstallation. However, the fact that a service pack upgrade caused an instability in a previously working standard software installation is a concern. If it was only a matter of drivers I wouldn't worry. Unfortunately, for me the real issue is that SP1 has provided no performance improvement at all - in fact performance is discernibly worse - and my system is far less stable than it once was. I waited almost a full year before I installed Vista RTM, waiting for the driver issues and inevitable bugs to be sorted out. After installing it, I was pleasantly surprised. All the previous problems I had with XP SP2 were gone. No more system freezes and slow downs under the weight of security scans; less degradation in performance when using Outlook; no more intermittent problems waking my computer from its sleep state in the mornings. These problems have all returned with Vista SP1 - in fact I have given up on Outlook and switched to Gmail. CONTINUED |
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