Excellent Vista SP1 Review
Mar
1
Written by:
3/1/2008 9:01 AM
Ryan Smith at AnandTech did a knowledgeable review of Vista SP1 a couple days ago. Critical to drive users to the lagging Vista, SP1 fixes a number of bugs (e.g., NTFS corruption on external drives) and even some design issues (e.g., slow file copying & compression), but not completely.
My pet peeve with Vista, the User Account Control (UAC), is less obnoxious. I quickly disabled it however and am unsure if I'll turn it on even now.
Network traffic is still throttled when MultiMedia Class Scheduler Service is active to ensure audio doesn't get interrupted during playback. With Vista, users were unable to adjust this. With SP1 this can be manually adjusted up from the default 10% using the following registry key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\
Multimedia\SystemProfile\NetworkThrottlingIndex
Too bad this value isn't dynamically adjusted as needed, perhaps with a priority level indicated by users, e.g., with an "Audio quality" setting.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) support is added as an optional BIOS replacement, heralding the new GUID Partition Table - a very welcome replacement for the antiquated, limited master boot record. Native support for 802.11n wireless networking now exists. The lightweight FAT file system has been modernized into exFAT, but most folks (even non-Windows) are well on the road to NTFS.
Overall, SP1 is a solid, worthwhile, incremental update, but is not overly exciting either.