Vista SP1: "a new beginning" for the Microsoft OS

The editor of Redmond placed on the Service Pack 1 for Vista to accelerate the adoption of its latest OS, which is difficult to convince companies as much as by individuals. SP1 does this, however, that 1 and 2% more performance.

Microsoft releases the first major update for Windows Vista. The opportunity for the publisher to boost its operating system, whose home is mixed with the general public and businesses.

"Widnows Vista SP1 is a new beginning for our OS," . "
if the OS is selling well with over 100 million licenses since its launch in late 2006. A figure is mainly due to the tying of new PC and not because of the enthusiasm of users. That is the opinion of Gartner: "Vista is seen as a required standard of the market but not as a technology," we said in 2007 one of its leaders.

Gartner notes that the widespread adoption of Windows Vista is slower than anticipated, and it will become the dominant OS on the market in 2009 instead of 2008.

Microsoft hopes that this first service pack will accelerate the adoption of Vista. It will also benefit from a strong communication campaign. Microsoft launches including France on Tuesday a new version of its website dedicated to french Vista, enriched with new features, user testimonials and information about hardware compatibility issues and performance.

"Many companies waited this service pack to start their deployments," says Nicolas Mirail. On its website, the publisher does not cite a single company to have finished its migration . It has deployed Vista on more than 6 000 jobs.

Microsoft ensures that the big wave is still to come with PSA, EDF, Colas (Bouygues Group), Les Pompiers de Paris or the Credit Mutuel-CIC. Altogether, in the next eighteen months, two million jobs that should be deployed with Vista in the enterprise.

Later the general public, the publisher also believe you to speed the pace of adoption, which is 400 000 Vista PCs sold each month. Next June, between 5 and 6 million PCs and Vista should have been sold since the launch of the OS in January 2007. According to Microsoft, almost all public PCs are now sold with Vista compared to only 70% last summer.

Beginning in April, the first PCs with Vista SP1 will arrive on the market. The boxes will also be available in early April, sold under the new price structure revised downwards.

Between 1 and 2% more performance

As we noted in our test Windows Vista SP1, the update makes the system a little better. But we should not expect a radical change. Broadly speaking, the performance of the system should grow by 1 to 2%, which is still behind Windows XP SP2.

SP1 fixes a major bug in Vista: the 'copy and paste large files, which may take several minutes. Microsoft argues that the gain with Vista SP1 reaches 50%, as in the case of a transfer from an external hard drive to the local disk.

In addition, the memory manager of the OS has been optimized to be more efficient, and must reactivate Vista more quickly when it is in standby mode.


Note that some programs have problems of compatibility with SP1, following the changes it brings to the system. Among them include a majority of Internet security, anti virus or firewall. Some are blocked, others see their duties reduced.

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