Vista SP1 out

[petereader]

Anyone notice (or care) that Vista SP1 (not RC) became available today? Is it too early to ask if anyone has tried it out on a Sage system and what your experiences, thoughts, etc. are?

http://www.news.com/8301-13860_3-989...l?tag=nefd.top

[sic0048]

God this is good news. I have high hopes for SP1....

Which means I will probably be very disappointed.

Thank goodness then only Vista machine I have is my wife's laptop which isn't mission critical. I would have gone back to XP long ago if it was mission critical.

[carlgar]

I have been running the official SP1 for over 3 weeks now and am very satisfied. I do not like the yellow tint the snipping tool gives to saved images. I also believe the task scheduler still needs some more fine tuning. If I am using the HD extender and I do a disk to disk copy, it almost stops the I/O to the HD extender. I get around this for the most part be reducing the task priority of the iexployer task to low. I did not see any improvement to the superfetch, I tuned it back on but it still seems to cause excess disk I/O, so I turned it back off.

[heffe2001]

Been running it since it hit Microsoft's Connect site early last month, and no problems with it and sage. For that matter, it fixes the problems with the MVP's and Vista. Now if Avermedia would release good, stable drivers for the m780 cards for vista, I'd be a happy camper... (I'm using it on around a half dozen machines, from my Sage box, to my Laptop, and no problems with any of them, other than the HUGE amount of time it takes to install...).

[petereader]

I have to say, I have had the oddest experience with Vista. I have a client and a laptop (running placeshifter) on Vista Ultimate, and aside from a few little glitches, my experience with Vista has been quite favorable. In fact, there were quite a few issues with Sage (and my HTPC in general) running XP that I was never able to resolve that seemed to have magically disappeared once I upgraded to Vista. Weird, I know. I must be crazy.

That being said, I don't really play games on my pc, and there is that one lingering issue with the TCP/IP stack and transferring large files. That's what I'm really most interested in with regards to SP1.

I ordered another copy of Vista Ultimate that should be arriving in the mail today. If that turns out to be the case, I'll be converting my other client over to Vista and that will effectively eliminate that last copy of XP in my house....Wow, hadn't thought about it that way until now.

I may wait a bit before installing SP1. I can live with the slow transfer speeds for a while. Sage is working flawlessly for me right now, and that is of utmost importance in my little world.

Still, I'm curious as to what others have experienced.

[sic0048]

I haven't been following the SP1 discussions at all. Is it suppose to fix the Vista file transfer speed problems? That is the biggest issue I have with Vista. For example, I've tried to update a program on the Vista machine and it takes over an hour to complete the file swap process, while on my slower XP machine it takes 1 minute. (No exaggeration on the times either).

Thanks

[petereader]

Originally Posted by carlgar

If I am using the HD extender and I do a disk to disk copy, it almost stops the I/O to the HD extender.

carlgar,
Do you still see this issue after SP1? I've run across a few articles that point to the network stack problem in Vista even between transfers of disk to disk within the same machine. I was hoping SP1 would provide more dramatic results in this area (am I asking for too much?).

Originally Posted by sic0048

I have high hopes for SP1....

Me too

[carlgar]

Originally Posted by petereader

carlgar,
Do you still see this issue after SP1? I've run across a few articles that point to the network stack problem in Vista even between transfers of disk to disk within the same machine. I was hoping SP1 would provide more dramatic results in this area (am I asking for too much?).

I no longer see any network stack related issues after the SP1 RC1 update. I thought I did but it looks like they were a result of the random HD extender lock ups. This is why I got the official SP1 release early.
This issue looks like the disk to disk copy just trys to copy as fast as possible and the scheduler is giving it too much time. This prevents the HD extender from getting its own data in a timely manner.

[petereader]

Originally Posted by sic0048

I haven't been following the SP1 discussions at all. Is it suppose to fix the Vista file transfer speed problems?

Here is a link to some of SP1's more notable improvements according to MS:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Window....mspx?mfr=true

Under the "Performance and Power Consumption Improvements" section it mentions quite a few promising improvements in regards to this issue. I hope the promise is realized.

[Crashless]

My Windows Update isn't showing the SP yet - has anyone actually been able to get the 'official' release through normal channels?

I sense that they're rolling this out to see if things explode before going wide...

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Crashless

My Windows Update isn't showing the SP yet - has anyone actually been able to get the 'official' release through normal channels?

I sense that they're rolling this out to see if things explode before going wide...

I'm downloading it right now at this link.

[Mark57]

FYI, if any of you run McAfee Viruscan 8.5i you need McAfee's as of yet unreleased patch 6 before applying SP1.

PS, McAfee’s Document ID # 615037 says it will not be released until June no less.

Issues:
• Port Blocking feature does not work when installed to Windows Vista SP1.
• Network scanning performance is reduced with Vista SP1 installed.

[Crashless]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I'm downloading it right now at this link.

Perfect! Thanks so much.

Anyone have any issues?

[Yooper]

I used the update service to download SP1. It seemed simple to me - only a 62 Mb download. What could go wrong? Some of the updates have been collectively larger than this.

Well, I went thru stages 1 and 2 of the install. The system then rebooted and started on stage 3. It stayed on stage 3 for 2 hours with it stuck at 0% progress - even though the hard drive would have some activity from time to time.

I rebooted in safe mode. It went back to stage 3. Right now, after another hour, stage 3 is 84% completed.

I'll keep you posted.

[petereader]

Alright,
After all my yapping about waiting I realized that I have a new Vista build that would actually be perfect to try out SP1 on. So, I installed Vista, loaded up my drivers, installed critical and important Windows updates (sans SP1). Then I did an image backup of my boot drive as well as create a restore point.

I then proceeded to copy over a 22GB folder from my server to this build and note the average transfer time (didn't use anything fancy for this, just what I saw from the extended description in the transfer rate window). It averaged about 9 MB/sec.

I then went ahead and installed SP1 (using the stand-alone installer). I can't recall how long it took to download, but it installed in about twenty minutes. I then ran the same transfer test and saw a speed increase to about 43MB/sec.

Although it's a rather simple test it does indicate a pretty significant improvement.

As far as stability is concerned, I spent the rest of the evening installing and configuring the rest of my programs (including Sage-Client) without a hitch. Time will tell but all good so far.

Oh and Crashless, one thing to note is that depending on your hardware and drivers SP1 may not show up on Windows update:
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/wi...ws-update.aspx

Just a heads up. It didn't show up for me either but my machine doesn't have any hardware that was mentioned by MS as a problem candidate.

-Peter

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Yooper

I used the update service to download SP1. It seemed simple to me - only a 62 Mb download. What could go wrong? Some of the updates have been collectively larger than this.

Well, I went thru stages 1 and 2 of the install. The system then rebooted and started on stage 3. It stayed on stage 3 for 2 hours with it stuck at 0% progress - even though the hard drive would have some activity from time to time.

I rebooted in safe mode. It went back to stage 3. Right now, after another hour, stage 3 is 84% completed.

I'll keep you posted.

Mine only took about 30 minutes for all 3 stages and didn't stick. Was freshly installed Vista right before the update to SP1 so that maybe why it worked so quickly for me.

[mattdcknsn]

I was looking at some of the changes listed and here is an interesting one:

 Adds new capabilities to Windows Media Center:
o Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center systems.

"networked DVD players"? I thought the DRM on DVDs took away that capability.

[Mark57]

I just finished applying SP1 to both of our boxes. I did the full standalone version from the local drive. It took about an hour plus 3 reboots. Performance is better. File transfers between machines is definitely faster. SageTV seems unaffected but logging is staying on. So far I'm very pleased.

[Taddeusz]

I was one of the lucky ones who accidentally received SP1 early through Windows Update a few weeks ago. It's been running great since I got it. I have noticed improved performance in copying files. Even between local hard drives.

I've read a few things on why network transfers were going so slow. Basically prior to XP during a transfer the computer initiating the transfer would cache the data being copied and the computer receiving would also cache the data and not write it immediately. What they were trying to do was prevent the data from being cached twice during a transfer and as a result Vista doesn't cache anything and writes the data directly to disk as it's being received. In SP1 they sort of made a compromise. If the Vista computer is talking with something other than Vista it will fall back on the old method. If it's talking with another Vista computer it will use the new method.

[Yooper]

Follow upon my earlier post....

After a time my 3rd stage install got to 100%. But not joy. It then announced that the install failed and it was reverting. OMG! Several hours and no joy!

Fortunately, the revert worked and my previous vista without SP1 was restored.

I am now doing my homework on what to do. Back later.