I mentioned two posts ago ( approx) that I'll keep you posted on what happens when the grace period for Vista SP1 expires. Well that happened a few days ago and here's what happened.
-> first ..and this was immediate , actually a few hours before it expired , my background turned black. But that was fixed by simply ..resetting the background :)). It might just go black again once I reboot but it really doesn't bother me. Also someone mentioned that Aero will be disabled. Well it;s hasn't so far, it's working just fine. Later edit: it reverts to black after some time ..or after runing a full screen app.
-> second the system keeps telling me ..from time to time let's say once every 30 minutes that I may be a victim of sofware counterfiting. It's not only that I'm a victim, I'm an addict of counterfited software :))
-> third thing, when you boot up , after logging in, a screen appears that tells you to register now, and the register later button becomes active after about 15 seconds.
-> this is a curios one: from time to time when i use my cpu for more than just listening to music or refreshing my desktop ..let's say when a play a demanding game, it stalls for a few seconds and then goes back to normal . That has happened a few times and i know for a fact it has never happened before. Now this was not mentioned anywhere in the effects sp1 might have, nor have i heard of anyone having such issues. It might just be that my hard drive is kinda old and maybe it's just failing. Not sure on this one.
-> another curios one: updates still work. Two days after my license expired I downloaded and installed the latest definitions for Win Defender. I really wasn't expecting this. I read somwhere that usual updates will not be delivered anymore but critical ones will. MS is socially obliged to deliver the critical updates to all machines even if they say they won't/don't/whatever. Right now this seems to be the case.
So to sum up , if you don't mind ocassional small popups ( they really don't bother me and they aren't even on top of other applications) and the fact that you have no background, you can get all the benefits of the SP1 without worrying of anything bad happening ...for now at least. Whichever way this develops I'll keep you posted. And for any experiences or questions please be sure to leave a comment.