Brightrev

I'm a little late to the party on reviewing Windows Vista SP1, but it's becoming widely available as I write this, so now is as good a time as any to write a review.  However, I'm going to take a bit of a different tack with my SP1 review.  Rather than try to cover every feature or improvement in SP1, I'm going to cover my experiences, including specific things that I have seen changed for the better and my recommendations in regards to deployment.

I've installed Vista on a half dozen or so machines and had excellent experiences.  When I setup a service pack, I just want it to install and not break anything.  On all but one machine, SP1 installed successfully in about an hour.  The one problem I had was on a Dell Latitude D620 laptop with corruption in the file system.  The SP1 install hung on a single DLL file and continuously flashed the filename in white text on a black screen.  I knew this system had issues, but thought I had fixed them prior to the install.  As I said, this was a file system issue and not an SP1 issue.  In fact, after running CHKDSK and System Restore to roll back the install, I was able to successfully install SP1 on that machine.  My Windows Vista machines have been running great with SP1 for almost two months. 

Windows Vista SP1 rolls up a bunch of previously released application compatibility and performance updates.  Put simply, your applications are more likely to work on Windows Vista SP1 than they were on the original release-to-manufacturing (RTM) version of Vista.  There are still some corporate applications that won't work on Vista, but these are becoming fewer and fewer.  Although I moved from PDFCreator to CutePDF due to the former's Vista-incompatibility, I don't currently have any applications that won't run on Vista.  I test dozens of apps in VMWare virtual machines and I have always been able to find at least one application that will do what I want and run on Vista.  With a few exceptions, application compatibility is not a problem with SP1.

Since I installed SP1, I've seen improvements in several areas.  First, file copy performance has been drastically improved.  On Vista RTM, it doesn't matter whether you copy files from one directory to another, to or from a USB drive or over the network.  They're all really slow.  When you start copying files in Vista SP1, the dialog pops up immediately rather than taking several seconds to load, and files copy as fast as they did on Windows XP.  This was a real problem on Vista RTM and is much improved in SP1.

Second, power management and sleep modes have been improved in Vista SP1.  I have two machines that had power management problems in Vista RTM.  Prior to Vista SP1, my Vista Media Center PC's sleep mode was inconsistent.  It would periodically wake from S3 sleep as if it had been put in hibernate mode, page the drive incessantly and take FOREVER (5 whole minutes!) to resume.  I don't have to wait five minutes for a CD player to start, so I shouldn't have to wait that long for my Vista Media Center.  In SP1, my media center PC wakes from S3 sleep in less than 10 seconds every single time.  This is a HUGE improvement when I want to listen to music in the living room.  My other PC runs a cheap motherboard with a BIOS hacked for power management to work properly.  It continues to have a problem waking from sleep once per week or so.  I'm going to give Microsoft a pass on that system because the manufacturer's BIOS doesn't support sleep mode at all, so I can live with a 95% sleep/wake success rate on a hacked BIOS.

Third, Vista RTM's version of ReadyBoost rewrites the entire cache on each sleep/wake cycle, which makes machines incredibly slow every time they come out of sleep mode.  This problem essentially made ReadyBoost unusable with power management on Vista RTM.  My understanding is that Microsoft kept the encryption and security features while getting rid of the huge cache rewrite in SP1.  ReadyBoost now suffers no performance penalty on Vista SP1.

Finally, the remote desktop client on Windows Vista RTM prompts for credentials every time it runs.  This is an annoyance more than anything, as it didn't provide any additional security in administering Windows Server 2003 machines.  It doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you connect to servers a half dozen to a dozen times per day, it gets old quickly.  Vista SP1 includes a new remote desktop client that you can tell not to prompt you for credentials on every connection. 

Check out Brightrev's Windows Vista SP1 setup gallery.

Everyone would agree that Microsoft made mistakes when they released Windows Vista.  However, there is one mistake in particular that hasn't received the press it deserves.  Windows Server administration tools didn't work properly on Windows Vista until very recently.  While it's possible to administer servers with RDP connections, leaving out the admin tools made it painful for Systems Administrators and Engineers to administer their domains from a Windows Vista PC.  This led to many Sysadmins holding back from Vista and staying on XP.  It took Microsoft almost a year and a half to fix this problem. 

Microsoft should understand that Sysadmins are major influencers on the PC market.  In most cases, Sysadmins dictate what operating systems are run on corporate networks.  In addition, Sysadmins usually (heh!) have an extended group of family and friends who depend on them for advice and support.  By making it difficult for Sysadmins to run Vista, Microsoft missed out on these people recommending Vista to their companies, families and friends.  What makes the problem worse is that Sysadmins are often able to fix problems that other people can't, since that is what they're paid to do.  Microsoft could have had thousands of Sysadmins running Vista, figuring out problems and helping people fix them.  Instead, we've heard almost a year and a half of screaming that Vista sucks.  To be fair, administration tools were also not available for Windows XP at launch and it didn't suffer from lackluster sales.  However, the blogosphere essentially didn't exist in 2001, so no one heard the complaints back then. 

It's really pretty simple.  Sysadmins aren't going to recommend Windows Vista if they don't run it.  Microsoft held back developing administration tools for no discernible reason, making it tough for Sysadmins to run Vista.  Again, this isn't the only mistake Microsoft made with Vista, but it was a major mistake.  Admin tools should have been available the day Vista was released to manufacturing.  Read another perspective on this issue from 4Sysops.com and a thread about it at the TechNet forums.

Unless you have a specific application that doesn't work, it's time to deploy Windows Vista SP1.  All my Vista SP1 machines are extremely reliable, my day-to-day applications work and I have no driver issues.  After initial setup, Vista user account control prompts are minimal.  Here's a dirty little secret: Windows XP isn’t as great as everyone says.  There's no question that XP runs better on old hardware and that compatibility with oddball vertical market apps is better.  But XP is also much more prone to malware infections, and it's a big pain to setup new images due to the 100-odd hotfixes that need to be loaded on every install.  If you've got apps that won't run on Vista, you're stuck with XP for now.  However, Microsoft has made tremendous progress in reliability, compatibility, power management, file copy performance and a lot of other areas in SP1.  My Vista machines are less problematic than my XP machines every were.  And yes, you can finally, FINALLY administer your domain from Vista.  I think SP1's release means that it's time to recommend and deploy Windows Vista.

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