Windows Vista SP1 Now Available ... Is It Worth It?

Today Microsoft released the long awaited Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista. We have seen some positive performance gains with the prior release clients offered to the public, and wanted to test what changes, if any, the final release has. For this test we picked a review notebook that we have in the office right now (Averatec AV2500), and benchmarked it before and after the SP1 Standalone update.

Averatec AV2500 Specifications:

• AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64 2.2GHz Dual Core Processor
• Windows Vista Home Premium
• 12.1" WXGA LCD
• 2GB DDR2 667MHz (2 x 1GB)
• Hitachi 250GB 5400rpm Hard Drive

For each test, we ran each benchmark twice. Our benchmarks include 3DMark06, PCMark05, and wPrime 1.58.

Before SP1:

PCMark05	3,168 PCMarks
3DMark06	381 3DMarks
wPrime	36.019 seconds

After SP1:

PCMark05	3,037 PCMarks
3DMark06	377 3DMarks
wPrime	38.968 seconds

Results Summary:

PCMark05	4.1% drop in performance
3DMark06	1.0% drop in performance
wPrime	8.2% drop in performance

Every test across the board showed a drop in performance, which was very surprising as we had very favorable results with a prior release client of SP1 when we were testing the Dell M1530. The 3DMark06 score was very close before and after, but the other two benchmarks show a pretty clear drop in performance.

Since we know that many of you will be installing this thing probably as fast as we did, please post your results before and after to share what results you are finding after upgrading to Service Pack 1.

 

I can't understand how scores can drop after SP1. Something must be wrong. Anyway, you should re-install the drivers after SP1.

 

I read of two people having improvements so far. As F2B (can I call ya that ? ) suggested, something has to be wrong.

 

Installed it.

SuperPi on my machine had an initial drop of 1.2%, I re-Installed, and did a single Inf tweak (see: Kernel Version) to my drivers, and got a net 1.7% gain.

Did this a while back.

Best thing is - I HAVE LONGER BATTERY LIFE WITH SP1! (holla to anyone else here who is a M$ partner and got SP1 legit in Febuary)

 

So is it the problem with drivers ????

 

SP1 seems better for me too, had it installed for several weeks now...
ExiledDuke is right, battery life is better so... Jump on it!

 

My results:

Before SP1

WPrime32: 40.652sec
PC Mark05 CPU Score: 3790

After SP1

WPrime32: 43.336sec
PC Mark05 CPU Score: 3702


<strike>I have no explanation for the wide variance in the WPrime scores, other than the post-SP1 one coming from a much newer version..........</strike>

Update: I reran WPrime with an older build and got a more sensible score, but it is still a "hair" behind before.....

 

Since we are having some troubles locating the drivers for the Averatec notebook, we are also going to see what happens with the Asus u2e. My personal notebook and desktop at home are kinda SOL at the moment though, since they are stuck with a copy of the release client SP1 that wont uninstall

 

Remember that SP1 erases ALL indexes and optimizations that Vista does with continuous use. I'd say the tests may be more valid after giving SP1 a few days of normal use to optimize itself.

Who knows, I may be dead wrong, too.

 

Im confised as to whether I should install SP1 lol

Will it reinstall stock drivers etc?

 

No, my previous drivers appear to be intact (as far as I can tell).......

 

If battery life is better, they have worked on the power management... which makes me wonder... if anyone with the CPU whine problem has installed SP1 and seen any improvement? Currently I get the whine in Vista but not in Ubuntu but havent upgraded to SP1 yet...

 

What he said. Take the Averatec (they make great Ultra Portables) and leave it on overnight - force it to index the whole HDD, and turn Superfetch off,

Or - you could do the extreme thing:

1) Take a laptop and do a clean install of vista.
2) make a backup of this
3) test it
4) install sp1
5) test it
6) install the backup, and then the hotfixes
7) test it

The difference between Vista-Relase, Vista hotfixed, and Vista SP1 should be clear.

This is a bit much work, but it is also the best way to get "pure" results.

 

That would indicate Vista SP1's insertion as a definition to the word 'awesome' and make me a very happy man.

 

Slightly OT, but what's an Averatec AV2500? I thought Averatec was dead in the water and it's not on their website. Curious b/c I had/have a 2260 12" lappy that has served me well.

 

Oddly enough, the Intel machine in the office (Asus) is seeing the opposite, and getting gains across the board on all benchmarks. This is on the first reboot after installing SP1.

Wprime went from 86 to 80s
PCMark05 went from 2145 to 2246
3DMark06 went from 407 to 404

Perhaps this is more friendly to Intel systems than AMD?

 

Perhaps it is just typical system idiosynchrasies. One test rarely seems to glean the same result as those before it.....

 

For those who have installed, are file transfers faster (for example, transferring data to a flashdrive)? That is my biggest gripe with Vista to date........

 

File transfers within folders seem faster, but not as quick as XP. Of course this is only perception, as I've not timed anything...........

 

I installed SP1 from MSDN a while ago. I didn't have to reinstall any drivers. System was and felt much faster. I didn't benchmark anything though. Then, I decided to reformat/reinstall with Vista/SP1 released about 1.5 weeks ago on MSDN. Got my system back to the way it was before and let me tell you...it is much faster than before. I think clean install is the way to go.

My two dollars worth.

 

A detailed analysis of SP1 with benchmarks. XP is still faster...

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3233

 

This may be a rather unintelligent question, but how does this one differ from the one I got using a registry hack a while back?

 

Some people reported that wPrime takes more time with version 1.6.

 

Yep, that was the version I initially ran. I went back to 1.55 for the posted results.

 

I have noticed quite a large speed increase...

I don't think the testing of Vista vs SP1 was done in the right manner....

 

Quite frankly I used to get 38 seconds in the 32M speed test and now I get 60 something. Quite weird I might add. Something must be wrong.
First thing I found about version 1.6 was from this forum: "With wPrime 1.6, I was getting ~70secs, but after trying out wPrime 1.55, I got a 32M score of 46 seconds!!!!!!"
I can confirm this. It happens to me too. With 1.6 I get around 66 seconds, while with 1.55 I get 38. Same settings, different results, by a huge margin. So damn annoying.
I suggest you try running wPrime 1.6 and 1.55.

 

i havent installed the SP1 as of yet...
will do it on the weekend, but i dnt have any high hopes...

also,am defiantely downgrading to Xp once SP3 is available...
never been a vista fan...

 

I have probably run PCMark and wPrime 6 times on the Averatec so far after upgrading, and while the times change a bit, it is still 3-4% slower on PC Mark and 7-8% slower on wPrime.

Maybe tomorrow after a day or chugging along things will improve on that notebook.

For those of you testing with wPrime again, dont use 1.60. Across the board on everything we have tested, it is much slower than anything in the 1.5x range. For reviews we stick with 1.58.

 

ugh... as long as the file copy performance is more like XP I will be happy.

man... ms stinks.

 

Much like a clean install of Vista, SP1 might need a few restarts before it settles in. Maybe to a loop of restarts (like 5-6 times) and then run the tests.

I think even MS has pointed out this weird behavior in Vista.

 

Hey guys for a clean install would it be better for me to use the stand alone, or just operate windows update on recovery. Windows update scenario after recovery do I have to install a whole lot of updates or just Vista Service Pack One.

 

I'd prefer the standalone and a clean install to running any oem recovery...

Also, please don't cross-post. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=230963&page=24

 

Other computer tech sites did this and saw more conclusive results.

Kevin, was the computer you tested running a fresh install of original Vista without any hotfixes/windows updates?

Remember that SP1 is mostly a compilation of previous hotfixes and updates, so if you compare a system updated regularly with hotfixes against one with SP1, the differences will be very small. But if you compare a system with a fresh install of the original Vista without updates and hotfixes with a system just updated with SP1 you will see a marked improvement.

This is the general concensus on the web and so I am more apt to believe that than the results posted here. Either the notebook already had some updates or the hardware drivers are wonky or we can simply attribute the small decline to the cleared cache files.

 

I agree that a fresh install of Vista would be "ideal" for testing, but let's get serious. Do we really think most average consumers (and even business professionals) are likely to do a clean OS install just to upgrade to SP1?

Come on. We all know that people are going to use Windows Update or use the link for the stand alone update on the Microsoft site. If SP1 can't produce consistent performance improvement following a standard update then I'd say SP1 isn't the savior update Vista users (myself included) have hoped for.

That said, I'm still about to install SP1 on one of my machines at home and I'll post the results after the update.

 

There really wasn't that much of a need for a "savior" anyway. Most of the patches and hotfixes that have been released over the last year have fixed a large number of issues. The only thing left to deal with was slow file transfer speeds (both network and internal). Microsoft never intended to release service packs for Vista anyway, it was only after corporate pressure that they decided to cram all of their updates into a single "Service Pack 1".

I did the upgrade to SP1 just a few hours ago (no clean install for me), I feel that Vista doesn't suffer nearly as bad from age bloat as XP did. In other words, I don't think Vista requires users to format once a year to maintain performance, it does a much better job of dealing with that crap itself (also, trimming startup programs does wonders, just like in XP).

Anyway, you can tell startup happens a little bit slower because the cache was cleared... but overall things actually DO feel a bit more subjectively zippy when loading.

Three things I tested (subjectively), starting Steam, starting up a game of HL2, and opening up Word 07, typing a word (nomothetic), right clicking the word and pressing define.

In all cases things are moving faster, most notably, for some reason the define function is twice as fast. Also, the Steam browser is more responsive at startup, less of a lag when switching tabs after first loading.

Here are my results for the HL2:LC benchmark.

Pre SP1
Driver 169.25
HL2:LC
68.12 FPS

Post SP1
Driver 169.25
HL2:LC
69.18 FPS

Virtually no change whatsoever, then again I had already loaded all of the Vista game-related hotfixes.

But certainly no decline!

Also, DreamScene now takes up marginally less CPU power, percentages of about 10% on each core while running, compared to about 15% on each core pre SP1. Again, virtually negligible.


Anyway, please post back with your own impressions!

 

Lets not forget what SP1 is for...fixing things. Performance may NOT improve for many applications. Lets review some of the problems I had with Vista pre-SP1...

WiFi connections were buggy...
USB drivers self destructed...USB ports didn't work...
USB Hard Drive transfers were SLOOOOOW...
SATA Optical Drive continually disappeared...
Major compatibility issues with older software, minor-to-major compatibility problems with newer software...
UAC was way too annoying sometimes...
If you played music, networking just got a LOT slower...

A lot of users would not have all of those problems, and I was unlucky enough to get all of them. There were many hotfixes that were available, but not downloaded by default and not well tested. Dell included, in my Vista-desktop (which is now running XP BTW), about 45 hotfixes on the default installation (but sadly not on the recovery discs). 18 of those hotfixes had to be requested from MS techs, and not "just available" for download.

SP1 moves all those hotfixes to production quality, and could potentially fix like 95% of all Vista related problems. Not 95% of all performance complaints.

My hunch is that performance, as a whole, will not improve much. It may even seem the same between pre/post SP1 machines.

Gaming performance will probably increase, as Vista optimizes some of the memory-hogging buggers that were causing issues. But other than that, I don't see the general experience improving with respect to performance.

But I do see the general experience improving with respect to usability and compatibility, and less bugs. Not improved performance.

 

Hmm... Vista SP1 on a AV2500?

Well, there's your problem. Vista doesn't even run well on the AV2300 without a hacked bios to enable proper CPU stepping. Throw in all the other problems with Averatec, and well... that alone can contribute to the lower SP1 performance.

 

yes, i think everybody with an understanding of scientific method understands that the original test was extremely poor.

in fact, i think the initial post is extremely misleading.

StormEffect's post should be put at the top of the thread, all other posts deleted, and the thread locked... cuz he pretty much said it all.

 

Well, I've installed the service pack and things seem zippier. That is good enough for me. Synthetic benchmarks don't say a whole lot IMHO, and I'll take it "feeling" zippier over an improvement in a synthetic benchmark. Perhaps I'll post more as I play around with it...

 

I just installed SP1 on my Asus A8Js with an nvidia GeForce Go 7700 video card and now my max resolution is 1280x720 (native is 1440x900). I re-installed the driver but I'm still stuck at this resolution. Any ideas?

 

...pr0n does that to a laptop...

On a serious note:

I have tested this (with some consistency) on 8 machines. 4 Intel/nVidia, 2 Amd/nVidia, 1 AMD/ATI, 1 intel/ATI.

On all the intel machines - marked improvements were made... most notably on my personal rig, my SATA Optical Drive stopped dissappearing.

On the AMD machines there were ups and downs: inconclusive, all that was proven was that, yes... Microsoft and Intel have been pounding the mattress... and yes, SP1 is better for intel than AMD, but whatever, it is the stability we are after!

One interesting thing that I found (I swapped graphics cards to prove this) is..
I had identical rigs, save the gfx, and I swapped the GFX to see if this was repeatable, it seems that ATI/intel responds best to SP1 over any...

so... best to worst for SP1...

1) intel/ATI
2) intel/nVidia
3) AMD/ATI (one would assume though I did not test gfx with AMD)
4) AMD/nVidia

5) if you have integrated graphics, you do not have the right to respond to anything dealing with 3dMark. the x3100 is a step in the right direction, a big one. The sad thing is, even though it is a huge step in the right direction, it is still sooooo far from acceptable.

 

We aren't telling everyone out there to not install it. We posted one result, and asked others to share what they were seeing first hand after their own upgrade. Like I mentioned in the OP, we had pretty positive results with the M1530 towards the end of last year with the RC SP1 upgrade giving almost a 10% jump in performance. I was hoping for similar results, and the notebook bombed across the board with the update.

While many people think we have thousands of notebooks filed away on the shelfs for massive testing, we are fairly limited to what we have on hand. The Averatec was around since we are also reviewing it at this time (and had Vista installed) so we chose that.

I would have used my personal notebook or desktop, but right now they are somewhat FUBAR with the original release client of SP1. I cant uninstall it without wiping the systems, and I probably wont have time till the weekend for that.

Good to hear that the AMD notebook results we found were not that big of a fluke after all.

 

That's not good!

All I can think of is to try completely uninstalling the driver from the uninstall panel and then restart. See if the default windows driver allows you to mess with the resolution and put it back at native.

Then go to laptopvideo2go.com and download 169.25.

Follow the instructions posted on the sticky about updating videocard drivers in the gaming section.

 

Thanks for the quick reply and advice; I appreciate it.

I uninstalled the driver, rebooted, let Vista install the new hardware, rebooted again and I'm still at 1280x720. I then tried the latest driver from support.asus.com again but no luck. It's getting late so I'll try the laptopvideo2go.com drivers tomorrow.

I understand what laptopvideo2go does but just out of curiosity, why 169.25? I don't see the 7700 listed there and there are many others that are newer (although I did not check for the 7700 in any of them).

And as a side note, I'm running 32bit Vista Business and SP1 was downloaded and installed through Windows Update; it was not a stand alone download and install. My wife also has an A8Js but she's running Vista Ultimate and strangely enough, SP1 was not available for her.

I did a WHS backup right before installing SP1. Worst case scenario I'll go back to that and do SP1 at a later time.

 

Just installed SP1 and it still takes 30 minutes to transfer 550 megs over my wifi. Still over twice as long as I used to send stuff to a old toshiba running ME. Vista's lame. SP1 does nothing for transfers here.

 

Because 169.25 is the most recent official stable driver on Nvidia's website for the desktop version of your card.

It will show up eventually on your wife's system unless she has drivers identified to cause problems in SP1. She might have to check for updates in the windows update panel on the upper left.
Otherwise try going to microsoft's windows update website, that is what eventually caused SP1 to appear on my system.

Good luck.

 

That's strange since my system is different story:-

Vista >> Vista SP1 (via 802.11n -- 130 Mbps)
It takes 2:53min to complete transferring 700MB file.
= 4.04 MB/s

Vista >> Vista SP1 (via Gigabit LAN)
It takes 21 seconds to complete transferring 600MB file.
= 28.5 MB/s

Vista SP1 >> Vista (via 802.11n -- 130 Mbps)
It takes 4:38min to complete transferring 700MB file.
= 2.51 MB/s

Vista SP1 >> Vista (via Gigabit LAN)
It takes 16 seconds to complete transferring 656MB file.
= 41MB/s

 

All I know right now (haven't messed with my Vista computer much since I installed SP1 this afternoon) is that my Cisco Clean Access Agent dumped all over itself post-SP1. Therefore, I can't connect to my uni's network because when CCA does load, it says I don't have latest Windows updates installed. Lame.

 

Why I still can't get the update through Windows Update?

 

I haven't noticed any noticeable peformance increase or decrease but I haven't run any formal benchmarks either. Today I had the first opportunity to test the battery life and I was shocked - with my dv9500t I was lucky to get 2 to 2.5 hours at best, today I went 2.5 hours and still had 30% left on the meter