Comments on: Vista SP1 vs SP2

By: Oldmainframer

Oldmainframer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:08:52 +0000

In all my years playing with computers, going back to building the MITS Altair and the IMSAI 8080 I’ve not seen such a thorough wringing out of an OS. Commendations! As I’ve gotten older I’m less inclined to be an OS pioneer, usually waiting for a new OS when I get a new computer. So now I run a Vista Home Premium X64 desktop and a VHP x86 laptop. I finally got them both tweaked to my satisfaction after a lot of headaches. I got my wife a new laptop with Win 7 installed and I really must say it may be much richer in features but it has much less intuitive UI than Vista. So even though I got the Win7 family pack, I’m holding off touching my two Vista machines for a while.

PS: I nearly forgot the IBM 701…….System/390

By: Andy

Andy — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:51:14 +0000

Much appreciated, thank you!

By: Harut

Harut — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:47:42 +0000

When I had service pack 1 the safari browser did’nt work.
Now I have changed my windows vista to service pack 2 and the safari works fine.
It’s great. Thanks for this article

By: mikeyboy

mikeyboy — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:30:35 +0000

Thanks for your update,I only wish I read it earlier, I had installed service pack 2 as a microsoft update, really wish I had not bothered, it played havock with my system, & for some reason the uninstall was anything but straight forward, then there was the issue of no sound after the install & uninstall , eventually got that sorted, in my opinion it is not worth the so called update. Leave for now is my advice ,unless you have been advised otherwise..

By: darryl

darryl — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 18:26:28 +0000

Thanks for you’re efforts, and interesting read while i installed SP2, on my new vista 64 (upgraded from 32).

Ofcourse, SP’s are not all about performance, if a few extra CPU cycles are spent on extra security, garbage collection, or stability, then that is acceptable for me too.

I would not leave upgrading to the last service packs based on performance alone, im sure there is alot “under the hood” that would be of benifit.

So it’s installed now, without a hitch, but with a reboot.

By: oz

oz — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:30:20 +0000

good article. made a lot of sense .
I guess i will stick to my sp1 for now I upgrade to W7.

By: Polar Bear

Polar Bear — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:38:02 +0000

Thanks for the hard work! I have an old laptop running XP home (sp3), a desktop running Vista Home Premium, and a new laptop running Windows 7 64bit. So far I have to say that Windows 7 is the most stable. I also like XP. I am not really a big fan of Vista. I don’t even bother to install SP1, not to mention SP2. Your article just reinforces my decision not to install SP2. SP1…I will think about it. Again, your article is much appreciated!!

By: Maggie

Maggie — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 16:27:18 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to do this, and to put it out there for everyone to read.

I’ll probably stick with SP 1 on the basis of this, but you helped me make my decision.

Much appreciated.

By: pf camp

pf camp — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:54:14 +0000

Excellent article – many thanks.
Just now considering the SP2 upgrade (due to persistent MSoft nagware). Thanks to your work we’ll pass on SP2 and perhaps do Win v7 (or switch to a MAC).
Again – sincere thanks.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:51:59 +0000

Cheers mate for taking the time to do this, had a couple system problems and was thinking maybe the upgrade would solve it.

By: Jan

Jan — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 13:24:38 +0000

Thanks a lot for sharing this info with us. I want to go back to SP1. Do I have to reinstall the original Vista or is there a shortcut?

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:01:06 +0000

Thank you so much for the article……GOOD JOB man

By: Josh

Josh — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 06:02:50 +0000

Good Job man. Cheers

By: M.D. McGinley

M.D. McGinley — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 03:42:24 +0000

I forgot to mention that since most of the updates included in SP-2 involve media handling and the ability to burn Blue-Ray discs, which is something I don’t do, that SP-2 seems like more of a luxury than a requirement. But hey, when has Microsoft ever come out with an operating system or program that was truly ready for the market, and didn’t need constant patches and fixes and new versions?

By: M. D. McGinley

M. D. McGinley — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:11:12 +0000

Ever since I installed Windows Vista Service Pack 2, I seemed to have lost something, whether it was compute cycles, tasks, available RAM and overall system efficiency. Every now and then, my system would take two or three minutes to shut down, and sometimes four or five minutes to power up. When I had my computer in the factory condition with the Norton Antivirus turned off, everything was so much more efficient involving powerup and powerdown, and so it began to feel like I had to many unnecessary bells and whistles with SP-2 on Vista (home basic).

My thinking is that of essential systems only. I have Themes turned off and I have my system tweaked to deliver maximum speed and performance and minimal decorations. I don’t like fluff, I like performance. All this on a Compaq Presario 5601 dual-core AMD K6 at 2.2Ghz and 1Gb SDRAM and 250Gb hard drive.

So a few days ago, I backed up all my data files to DVD and did a clean reinstall to factory condition. I don’t know about you, but there is something appealing about that, something desirable. “Clean install.” So, off came SP2 and all those (seemingly unnecessary) hotfixes that seemed to do nothing more than eat up my computing cycles and memory, and all the factory software was reinstalled. I immediately put on the most up-to-date downloads with Search and Destroy (Spybot) and let only the Windows Defender update, leaving all other hotfixes and “recommended” updates off, even the ones they called critical. My system has never worked better. It’s faster, it’s more efficient, and I haven’t had a program crashes since I rolled back to SP-1. (I play “Tank Universal” which requires gobs of memory, and under SP-2 it would crash about every 5th time).

So, yeah–if you are thinking about rolling back to Vista SP-1 from SP-2 in lieu of Windows 7, I would definitely recommend it, especially if you have a system that is older than one year. I just had a feeling I wouldn’t need SP-2, and my suspicions were confirmed. Also, when I reinstalled, I had the option to turn on or off the factory-included Norton Anti-virus and I took the “no” option, and again, I have pure performance now without all those unnecessary sentinels scouring my system and eating my precious compute cycles. It’s a good feeling.