Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 22 May 2008 09:30
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Once I’d backed up all my data, and re-loaded my initial Vista with Office 2007 image from late last year, I copied across the 400+MB SP1 update downloaded from Microsoft’s website to the desktop.
I then ran it, wondering if it would work, or if I would find myself stuck in endless reboot land, or switching on to no sound or video driver issues.
Surprisingly, I had none of these issues. SP1 informed me it would take around an hour to install and would reboot several times.
This it did, and went through the three main reboot cycles. When it got to the ‘Step 3 of 3’ reboot cycle, I waited anxiously for everything to load, and wondering if things would get stuck at 99% and reboot endlessly as had been reported by some users on the Internet.
But... as I mentioned previously, it worked, just fine. Suddenly I was back at the Windows Vista desktop, and a quick check of the System Information by right clicking on Computer from the Start menu and selecting properties indicated that I was, indeed, running Vista with Service Pack 1 installed.
Sound was working fine and video was working fine. I haven’t installed the Authentec fingerprint driver software because I found it to be more annoying than useful, so don’t know if that works properly or not, but given the success of audio and video... there’s every chance it would simply work fine.
I then tried the Windows Mobile Device Centre (WMDC) – which worked for the very first time with the i-mate Ultimate 9502. I also installed Norton 360 V2.0 – and this too installed flawlessly.
Things were looking up! The operation of my computer seemed quite a bit snappier too, but unfortunately it’s impossible to say if that really has anything to do with Vista SP1. After all, if you reload Windows on your computer right now, or restore a fresh, clean image, you’ll experience faster performance immediately, too.
So far, there have been no SP1 surprises other than the fact it’s working just fine on my system. I’m missing the ‘Search’ button in the Start menu, as I was very used to using it, but I am getting rapidly used to just using the search bar at the base of the Start menu, which brings up the same Search results box.
I have noticed that the UAC controls are much less inquisitive, it asks far fewer times for approval in things like file operations and just leave the file operation to happen once authorised.
But as previously mentioned, any other kind of speed up is hard to truly credit to SP1 because the machine is like new with a fresh OS install.
Please read onto page 3 for my final conclusions...
