Vista Service Pack 1

Published on Monday 18th February, 2008 (AEST)

Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista was released to MSDN/TechNet subscribers last week, and so far the final release is looking good. Microsoft have planned a staggered release of the SP, in order to minimise update headaches. So, for now, it has been made available to manufacturers and technical-type people, and won't be released to the public until mid-March. At that point, it will be available on the Windows Update site for customers who choose to install it. Later, in mid-April, it will start to be automatically installed on PCs where there are no known driver conflicts (more information on the staged release can be found on the Windows Vista Team Blog).

I've been testing SP1 on a Fujitsu LifeBook S2210 with 1.5Gb RAM, which had a few minor issues with the original release of Vista Business. The main problem I had was that the latest WLAN adapter drivers (including those on Windows Update) caused regular blue screens, and I hoped that SP1 would resolve this for me.

The installation of the service pack took approximately one hour to complete, with a few reboots during the process. Once the install was started, no real input was required.

One thing that I found interesting was that following the update, the system's Windows Experience Index score dropped from 2.8 to 2.4. After updating the video drivers this improved to 2.5. Previously, when running Vista Home Basic this had been a 3.0, with no difference in hardware.

On this system at least, SP1 appears to have made the system a lot more stable. Loading the latest WLAN driver no longer causes blue screens, and I haven't been able to reproduce any of the other errors I'd had previously.

No doubt, I'll be testing SP1 on other Vista systems soon, and I'll post updates when I do.

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