With the release of Vista pre-RC1 to testers, Microsoft was hoping that it would come through various tests faster than Vista.  This is what the company has been hinting at all along, that Vista SP1 would be the cure all for every performance related issues users have been experiencing in Vista but sadly, that does not look like it will be the case.

Computerworld found a Florida developer who had tested Vista SP1 on a dual core system with 1GB and 2GB of memory, and a dedicated graphics card, it was no faster than a standard installation of Vista without SP1.

According to those tests, “SP1 was never more than 1% or 2% faster.”  That’s going to disappoint a lot people including consumers and businesses alike.

Part of the reason Vista performs poorly on systems that may run XP fast is its feature set.  The article sites both Volume Shadow Copy and the snapshot service which are system services primarily used as backup and system recovery tools, that use up CPU and hard drive time which can slow the whole works down.

My recommendation is, if you don’t need a particular feature of Vista, turn it off in Computer Management, it’s possibly to gain a little speed by doing so.

While Vista SP1 may not make the operating system any faster, it does include reliability improvements, bug fixes and hopefully Microsoft will be able to fine tune it some more before the public beta or final release comes out.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 10:10 am under Microsoft, Upgrading, Vista.  Print This Post

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