Vista Service Pack 1
Posted on February 12, 2008
Filed Under Business Computing, Windows |
It was about a year ago that I wrote about Windows Vista’s release and spelled out my belief that while there would be some “bumps on the road”, they would be short lived and likely wouldn’t amount to much. I argued that Windows XP had suffered few problems that I could recall when it was released and that Vista would almost certainly follow suit. You can read my nonconformity at http://www.bowesit.com/blog/2007/02/01/should-you-switch-to-vista/
It wasn’t long after writing those words that Adobe Acrobat began to act up on my Vista based laptop and eventually stopped working altogether. Nothing for the love of country or money would make it work; I tried it all. It wasn’t long before many things stopped working, the computer slowed to a crawl, and drastic measures were needed.
My thought was that the upgrade process I used to get from Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista Business was likely at fault so I backed up my system and started from scratch. I wiped the thing clean and installed Vista from scratch, no upgrades this time! That was about 6 or 7 months ago and – knock on wood – so far there’s been little trouble.
With that behind me, it became increasingly obvious how few of my clients were buying computers with Vista installed; on the contrary, they were opting for XP Professional. XP, especially after service pack 2, had become very stable and few are willing to abandon it for an operating system that popular conjecture at least was labelling a dud. Clearly Vista is suffering an image crisis reminiscent of Windows Millennium (Me), arguably the worst flop in Microsoft product history.
The complaints about Vista are widespread even a year later and Microsoft has been under pressure to release a service pack to address the issues. Some of the more common problems seem to be:
Slow file copies
Just try to copy a bunch of small (or large for that matter) files in Vista. The process is painfully slow and on a computer with little memory, it even tends to crash leaving the user to start the file copy all over again.
Poor software support
Many of my clients couldn’t upgrade to Vista if they wanted to. Even now — a year later – many software vendors are not supporting Vista. Some of it will run if hacked properly but if the software is business critical, the last thing one wants to do is jeopardise vendor support. Some won’t run no matter how well hacked and even Microsoft Office versions prior to Office 2003 won’t run on Vista.
Poor hardware support
I have a Canon digital camera we bought when my son was born 5 years ago. There are no Vista drivers available for it and Canon will not make drivers available. The camera is simply useless when used with Vista. My camera is just one example of a long list of hardware that reportedly doesn’t work under Vista.
There have been a lot of updates but the problems remain. What’s needed now is a service pack that actually addresses the issues and thankfully there’s one on the horizon.
While released to manufacturing February 4, Windows Vista Service Pack 1 won’t be available for download until mid March. From a user’s perspective the changes won’t be appreciable but Service Pack 1 does promise to deal with some of those nagging problems. Paul Thurrott at the Windows Supersite has an excellent overview of Service Pack 1 at http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/vista_sp1.asp and Thurrott suggests there will be improvements in:
Device compatibility
Application compatibility
Reliability
File copy operations
Security
So, while this all sounds like I am an ardent Vista hater, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I still believe that for casual users with no mission critical software or hardware to run, Vista is a good choice. I’m just anxious to see how this all plays out.
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