[Offtopic] Vista Service Pack One

[Stephen Loosley]

Vista Service Pack 1 Details ..
By Nathan Weinberg. 12/11/2007
http://www.windowsdailynews.com/2007/12/11/vista-service-pack-1-details-blocker-software/#resume


Our writer, Long Zheng, has a detailed list of the major changes
in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, coming in beta any day now ...

. 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 PCs.

. Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user
accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner
hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder
acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.

. SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs
in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include
issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of
drivers included with Windows Vista.

. Improves reliability by preventing data-loss while ejecting NTFS-formatted
removable-media.

. Improves wireless ad-hoc connection (computer-to-computer wireless
connections) success rate

. Improves Windows Vista's built-in file backup solution to include EFS
encrypted files in the backup.

. Improves the performance of browsing network file shares by consuming less
bandwidth.

. Improves power consumption when the display is not changing by allowing
the processor to remain in its sleep state which consumes less energy.

. Improves power consumption and battery life by addressing an issue that
causes a hard disk to continue spinning when it should spin down, in certain
circumstances.

. Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed
(zipped) folder.

. Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files
underneath.

. Improves performance over Windows Vista's current performance across the
following scenarios:

   . 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same 
machine

   . 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to 
a
     SP1 system

   . 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1
     system

. Improves the copy progress estimation when copying files within Windows
Explorer to about two seconds.

. Improves the time to read large images by approximately 50%.

. Improves IE performance on certain Jscript intensive websites, bringing
performance in line with previous IE releases.

. Addresses a problem that caused a delay of up to 5 minutes after boot with
specific ReadyDrive capable hard drives.

. In specific scenarios, SP1 reduces the shutdown time by a few seconds by
improving the Windows Vista utility designed to sync a mobile device.

. Reduces the time it takes to return to the user's session when using the
Photo screensaver, making it comparable to other screensavers
--

Cheers, people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia
.