Some testing by the exo.performance.network research staff shows that SP1 provides no measurable relief to users saddled with sub-par performance under Vista.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2006-07-26
Member since:2005-11-11
While I fully agree with your sentiments about Norton/McAfee, Clamwin will be insufficient for a lot of people as long as this remains true: ClamWin Free Antivirus does not include an on-access real-time scanner - http://forums.clamwin.com/viewtopic.php?t=10
I use it myself, but lack of on access scanning (thus far) is a bit of a disadvantage. Moon Secure Antivirus is also clam based, and apparently has on access scanning (google it if you want). I have no personal experience with it though, and they seem to hide their use of clam pretty well.
ANYWAY I would have been pretty surprised to see SP1 bring noticeable improvements. It's sort of like people who are told not to complain about a game in beta (not saying Vista is beta) as the final game will be "optimized". It never happens. Just like we'd all need new hardware to play Crysis, some folks will need new hardware to get over performance issues in Vista. I hope the added features and security are worth it (I don't know, again no personal experience yet).
Member since:
2006-07-26
I have been installing Windows Service Packs from NT 4.0 Service Pack 1 and I have neither seen nor expected them to speed up the system at all.
I don't think that's the purpose of the Service Packs anyway, they're supposed to fix things, add funcionality, and the so ... in this case, besides, I bet Microsoft couldn't improve system performance with a Service Pack even if they wanted to do so.
About the testing, Vista does include that new scoring thing that tells you your system score: if the Service Pack does not modify that score, I doubt that any improvement (if it existed) was noticeable at all.
By the way, a P4/2.4GHz (no hyperthreading) with 1.5GB RAM DDR/333MHz, two 320GB UDMA/100 hard disks and an ATI Radeon Pro 9600 256MB gives me a 3.5 (the range is from 1.0 up to 5.9 if I am not wrong) score (CPU=3.5, RAM = 4.4, hard disk = 4.6, graphics card = 3.6) ... but the performance degrades once you install software, especially virus protection one.