Vista Service Pack 1

      

      Yes it’s true , it’s TRUE , it’s HERE. The new Vista SP1 is here. On March the 18th Nick White from MS announced its release on Windows Update. I found out about it that night. OK, so what did Microsoft promise about the SP? They said it would improve reliability, stability, efficiency, driver compatibilities, and other such issues. What does the SP do? Well mainly what it’s supposed to.

      After about half an hour ( that’s how long the update took) and 2 restarts I had SP1 up and running. I took a look at my win version , and wow major change from build 6000 to build 6001. Good sign, means the sp worked. Second change, you can now actually select which drive you want to defragment ( no I’m serious you couldn’t on the original release of Vista). I’m messing around here but that’s because I haven’t noticed any major changes. The system does seem more stable with certain aspects, and it looks as though there’s somewhat less CPU usage, but I also noticed about 10-15 % increase in RAM usage. MS said that the service pack would bring a 50% increase in file copying speed. Of course that 50% is only possible because with the service pack they fixed some sloppy scripting they had done in the original release. Plus I did a few tests with different files and personally I would estimate the increase at about 15-20% but maybe that’s just me.

      Compatibility with different drivers was indeed improved ( I only got 1 BSOD ever since I installed the SP and that’s with a very curious driver). Unfortunately Vista is hardware scripted, meaning that it is designed for specific hardware much like Mac OS is, thus making possible many compatibility issues. Hopefully by now most manufacturers have learned to test everything with both Vista and XP ( though this should have been going on for the last 1 year and a half) and such issues can be avoided. The problem persists with older hardware that doesn’t have support any longer but that’s a different story.

      So if you have a genuine Vista install you can install the SP and have all the wonderful benefits mentioned above. But what if you don’t ? There were two main hack for vista that made it possible for everybody to enjoy it without paying. One of them was tricking the activation timer into thinking you had 999 days to activate and then just rewind it again. The second method developed by Paradox was to fool Windows by emulating a specific BIOS and then use a specific key code. This would make Windows appear as if had been preinstalled by manufacturers and required no activation. Every update worked, no issues with anything, it would easily pass registration and had no problem with WGA. Well the SP1 takes care of both these methods rendering them useless for the time being. And I did a little snooping around but until now I haven’t found any way to bypass this. So if you didn’t have a genuine install, and you installed SP1 you probably now have 15 or less days to activate.
      The good part is that there is no more “reduced functionality mode” that Vista had. After the 15 days are up you’ll just have a black background, and continuous remarks from WGA that you may be using counterfeit software. That’s all. I’m curious what would happen if you uninstalled the sp after those 15 days. The old hacks might still work. I actually will try that on another computer just for the fun of it.

For the original info on the release of SP1 you can check out this link.

For a list of some of the updates ( but not all) contained in the SP you can check out this link ( I wouldn’t download anything from there, get the original if you want Sp1, it’s free) . If you want a full list you can probably find it somewhere on the MS site.

Questions, suggestions be sure to leave a comment.

Cheers, Geeky.