I received the mail today that Microsoft have begun automatic distribution of windows vista SP1 in English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese and felt it was definitely time I trialed out sp1 on my test machine to make sure it didn't cause any problems with any of the programs we here at Conchango run on our machines.
Many of my colleagues have also been trialing it out and I was forewarned that it took them almost two and a half hours for the upgrade to be completed when they installed it a number of weeks ago(when Microsoft released it for manual download). I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised that the upgrading of my vista test machine to sp1 only took a total of 34minutes with a stock standard dell d620 which is brilliant as means that hopefully if I can get my SCCM 2007 skills honed enough I may be able to distribute it to my windows vista clients during their lunch breaks once I have made sure it doesn't break their machines.
Many people on many different sites and here in Conchango too have been putting off the upgrading of their operating systems to windows vista until SP1 was released.Some of the problems that windows vista had on laptops that has now been fixed(some of which I personally fell victim to) are:
- Laptops which you joined to the domain, struggled to work offline because there was no Domain Controller available.Fixed
- More efficient screen refreshing, specifically re-designed to improve the battery life of your laptop.Fixed
- Laptops were slow to emerge from sleep or hibernation or even in some cases didn't emerge at all or didn't go into either and ran till the battery obviously died.Fixed
- Support for the ExFAT (Extended FAT) file system which allows easy use of flash storage devices.Improvement
The above are just some of the improvements that have been made that I was pleased about, if you want to know them all an easy search on Microsoft site will show you them all.
For those like me that are avid gamers the new support for Direct3D 10.1 is very good news indeed and with all the new security added into windows vista and now even more in SP1 maybe vista's profile will grow and more and more companies and individual home users will start to upgrade.
Hopefully after more testing ,all of the promises of Vista SP1 are proven to me and the problems with vista are the thing of the past.
Time will tell if vista will be categorised as another windows millennium or another windows xp(I categorise it as good at least)
As said in my previous posting:
If you too want to "ramble" on the prestigious Conchango blogging site like me send me a mail at gregg.robertson@conchango.com and I will be more than happy to pass it on for you and you will also be helping out the "Allow Gregg to buy more Playstation 3 games" fund which can only be a good thing.
Gregg Robertson
Conchango
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