Windows Vista Service Pack 1: What’s it Got?
By Chris on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 10:19 PM PST In Computer, Game Companies, Game Platforms, Gamer Life, Microsoft
Vista was launched prematurely, most people would agree, and I know I’ve heard the sentiment many times that Vista officially launches once Service Pack 1 arrives. Longtime Vista users like myself are anxious to see what SP1 contains, and Tech ARP has all of the improvements and enhancements that SP1 will bring.
Something of immediate to note to gamers is support for Direct3D 10.1 (read: DirectX) which shouldn’t concern owners of DX10 cards. Other tidbits that jumped out at me while looking through the article included decreases in User Account Control prompts in certain areas and correct reporting of the amount of memory installed (what’s actually installed will be displayed instead of what’s available to the OS).
Hopefully what we’ll get with SP1 is an overall more smooth and less annoying Operating System. Wishful thinking, I know.
Service Pack one will mean nothing. I use Windows Vista, and I like it, but there’s no escaping the fact that it can’t perform as well as Windows XP. It whores out CPU when idle, and that won’t change.
I’m always going to have a Vista partition for general stuff and a cut down XP partiton for gaming and CPU intensive tasks. Vista can’t cut the mustard.
SP1 looks like nothing but trivial changes. The beta I have on my laptop makes no difference at all. Still sluggish.
SP1 should be called 1.0. Lots of good stuff in there though.
Why does Windows 98 Second Edition come to mind?
@ Me
I haven’t had any problem at all with CPU usage. Mine idles at between 1-2% just like XP did. I also find it encodes video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 just as quick as in XP. DivX Pro and ConvertXtoDVD are both highly CPU intensive yet I find them both just as quick in Vista as in XP.
FYI I’m using Vista Ultimate 32bit with a Pentium 4 @ 4.2Ghz & 2gb RAM.
Are your copies of Vista clean installs? Most of the people I have spoken to who have had problems seem to have installed it over XP which is asking for trouble imo.
I have the beta installed on my laptop and Gaming rig.
And i find vista much better than xp.
Sure when vista was launched it was useless, but now its in xp’s league.
It took xp until sp2 to actually work. But right now vista feels just as good.
Maybe i get 4-5 fps more in xp, but when i’m getting 100+ what does that matter.
I have clean installs too. I think many people like you said have problems because they upgraded.
Also there system’s aren’t up to spec.
My laptop is a t7200 with 2gb ram, x1400 and 32bit premium.
My gaming rig is a E6600 @3.6, 4gb ram, 8800Gtx and 64 bit Ultimate.
vista sucks for Xbox 360 peripherals, playing frets on fire the xplorer guitar works, for Guitar Zero the strum dont work due to vistas xbox 360 drivers always taking over the XBCD drivers.
Also in Stepmania the dance pad doesent double step due to vista drivers taking over the XBCD drivers. the best part is the Xbox 360 peripherals work flawlessly in OSX. i love my MAC it out shines vista in many ways. vista only trys to copy OSX but dont hold a candle to it. this is all my oppinion. and dont any techs try to say you can manualy change the drivers, beleive me ive tried, vista takes over every time. read some forums on stepmania and Guitar zero with vista if you want. VISTA SUCKS, OSX RULES
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My take on the whole deal:
1. As an XP user, I’m interested in SP1 of Vista as well, maybe it’ll be good enough to help me make the jump
2. idle utilization issues aside, it’s an OPERATING SYSTEM that has SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS that are greater than XP which means that running XP on the same machine will produce better results than Vista.
“Xboxlenny says:
January 11th, 2008 at 10:11 am
vista sucks for Xbox 360 peripherals, playing frets on fire the xplorer guitar works, for Guitar Zero the strum dont work due to vistas xbox 360 drivers always taking over the XBCD drivers.
Also in Stepmania the dance pad doesent double step due to vista drivers taking over the XBCD drivers. the best part is the Xbox 360 peripherals work flawlessly in OSX. i love my MAC it out shines vista in many ways. vista only trys to copy OSX but dont hold a candle to it. this is all my oppinion. and dont any techs try to say you can manualy change the drivers, beleive me ive tried, vista takes over every time. read some forums on stepmania and Guitar zero with vista if you want. VISTA SUCKS, OSX RULES”
Oh God, another MAC fag… dude, go play with your OSX and let us real gamers play with what we think is best….
@ Weclock
I’m sorry but that generalisation simply isn’t true. Before I switched completely over to Vista I had a dual boot system with XP and Vista and I carried out tests where I timed how quickly Photo shop CS3 took to open a picture, how quickly DivX Pro encoded a 5min piece of MPEG2 video and how quickly the machine booted up and shut down. I dont have a stop watch so the timing was done just by a clock but the DivX and Photo shop tests were identical. XP started up a few seconds quicker but Vista shut down faster.
There are elements of Vista that need a higher spec to run smoothly but that doesn’t apply to the whole OS. Windows Aero is a major graphical enhancement over XP that needs a good system to run but 1) it isn’t included in the 2 cheaper versions of Vista and 2) You dont have to have it switched on so if you dont have a high spec it wont impair you at all.
The main reason Vista has higher system requirements than XP is simply because the vast majority of programs being designed for Windows now have far higher system requirement’s than they did 7 years ago.
Two points I have to make….
1. I recently bought a laptop to replace my gaming rig. The laptop is ASUS F3Ka with a Turion 64 X2 Processor Clocked at 2.0Ghz but its a Dual Core so does a little better, and Radeon HD 2600. It replaced my old pc and does out standing. Came with Vista and runs flawlessly. I love it and see no framerate drops. New systems are built for vista in mind. Other people upgraded to Vista. They should have known that its was a early release that no PC could run well but they ran them ok. Just like Sup Com and Crysis. This leads me to my second point.
2. TURN OFF AERO IF you have those problems stated. It whore up the CPU cause you use the CPU to render Aero with Dx9. Dx10 Card do that on the graphics card leaving more CPU for your personal usage. This was something that wasnt big on its release. Anyway you can make Vista look just like XP and run just as well but need to turn off some settings. Just like Crysis