There is an excellent article over on AnandTech regarding the upcoming general release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1, which has already been released to manufacturing (RTM) and to TechNet subscribers.

The article has an in-depth analysis of the improvements and fixes, as well as some detailed benchmarking tests to work out the specific speed improvements.

As there are 24 pages of hotfixes which address a variety of issues and incompatibilities, they only mention a few of them. However concerning the more major adjustments, users can expect to see:

• Less User Access Control Prompts
• Slight improvements in network performance
• File copy speeds improved (local copying up to 20% faster, network copying up to 50% faster)
• Data corruption issues corrected

In addition, there are a few new features which, although unlikely to wow anyone right now, will be significant as newer technologies are released.

New Vista Features

First up, the Extensible Firmware Interface is now included in Windows Vista, which will apparently free motherboard manufacturers from:

the ancient 16-bit real-mode for the startup/configuration abilities, along with the new features like GUID Partition Tables that offer a nearly unlimited number of partitions and better partition resizing.

In addition, Direct3D 10.1 has now been included which will allow graphics card manufacturers, namely AMD, to finally start taking advantage of this technology.

Hotpatching is now included, which should reduce the frequency of “Please reboot your computer to complete this update” type of messages that users are exposed to.

Other new features include:

• Wireless 802.11n support as standard
• Support of the exFAT file system (although this is largely focussed on mobile devices)
• New security API’s for developers

What does it mean for the end-user?

Overall, whilst the improvements should make things a little more solid for Vista’s users, the every day consumer or business user is unlikely to notice any major changes, and this is probably not what Vista’s marketing team are going to want to convey. As AnandTech concludes:

As far as the Vista user experience is concerned, users shouldn’t expect any significant changes with SP1. In this respect Vista SP1 is much like any other Windows service pack, rather than being another XP SP2. To that extent if you threw a pre-SP1 system and a post-SP1 system in front of us, we’d need to do some low-level benchmarking to identify which one was using SP1.

However, on the upside for Vista and its market penetration, there is one very strong factor which is going to start forcing users into considering the update, and that lies with the 64-bit version of Vista. Using a 32-bit operating system ensures that users are stuck with a maximum of around 3.25 – 3.5 Gb of RAM, even if you install 8Gb, your system can only utilise that limited amount. By upgrading to a 64-bit OS, there are no issues with the amount of RAM you install.

Windows XP x64 is plagued with driver and compatibility issues and it is unlikely that manufacturers will rush to fix these due to the relatively low usage of this version of XP. Whilst I’m sure there are likely to be some issues with compatibility on Vista’s 64-bit version, manufacturers are going to find a lot more demand for these issues to be corrected which should help progress us slowly toward a world of 64-bit computing.