Well it looks like the boys at Redmond have finally gotten the Vista Service Pack into a publicly available Release Candidate (Thanks to Slashdot for the heads up). As with most of their OS releases from the past decade, version 1.0 has issues. Most notably from my perspective is the agonizing plodding of the system when trying to unzip files. I have noticed that the unzip problem seems to be directly related to whether there are folders inside the zip. “Are there folders inside the file?” and “Will this take about 5 minutes shy of FOREVER to extract?” have the same answer. With any luck, SP1 will do what they claim…fix the speed issue.
Of course there are lots of other additions and fixes included in the SP ranging from support for EFI to correcting some power consumption issues from hard disks not spinning down when they are supposed to. A detailed list of fixes is available from Microsoft right here. Simply scroll down and find the files “Notable_Changes_in_Windows_Vista_Service_Pack_1_Release_Candidate.doc” and “Overview_of_Windows_Vista_Service_Pack_1.doc”. These go into far greater detail than I want to in this post.
As I type this, I am downloading the RC to install on my system so I can test how well MS has addressed some glaring deficiencies in their flagship OS. Don’t get me wrong, I love a great many of the design changes in Vista. I just notice that there are things that XP handles a little better or at least with more polish. I don’t agree with the nay-sayers who claim that XP is superior, but I also disagree with MS that Vista is the ultimate OS achievement.
Besides, if you go back and look at reviews and online discussions back in 2001 when XP was released you would see a great many horrible things said about it when compared to Windows 2000. As a matter of fact, it sounds just like the reviews and discussions being heard about Vista vs. XP right now. Funny how history repeats itself. I figure that in a couple of years we will hear how Vista is the greatest Microsoft OS and they shouldn’t worry about releasing the next version because it’s pointless. And the world will go on a-spinning…
-more to come after I install and use Vista SP1 RC for a bit