Stan Beer
Thursday, 08 May 2008 05:54
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
The news that Microsoft has finally made Windows XP SP3 available for public download after many delays may not be the cause for joy that many XP SP2 users are hoping for. In fact, there are some ominous smoke signals on the horizon which may well sound a warning for intending users not to download it just yet.
As one who has been stung by the Vista SP1
scorpion just recently, I feel there are some clear signs that all is
not well in the Windows development labs at Redmond. After using Vista
quite happily for six months or so, I founded myself being goaded by
Microsoft into "upgrading" to Vista SP1.
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
