Best SP1 review I’ve read yet

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Props to Ryan Smith at AnandTech for an excellent, thorough, detailed, and well-balanced review. A Second Shot: Windows Vista SP1 is worth reading (and re-reading).

The most interesting part to me was the detailed discussion on page 2 of the registry changes required to fix the performance problems you’ll observe if you try to perform file transfers over a network when a multimedia application is running.

Published by Ed Bott

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4 thoughts on “Best SP1 review I’ve read yet”

  1. I thought that MS was seriously looking at the throttling issue with MMCSS. The solution after installing SP1 is registry change? Aye ca rumba. I’m surprised that throttling is not based on some auto-sensing code.

  2. Vincent, the MMCSS issue was identified too late to be fixed in SP1, especially given that there isn’t any consensus on what the proper fix is. It will be part of a separate update later, I predict.

  3. No surprises in that thorough and thoughtful article.

    I do notice that I can play music and surf the web and scroll web pages and work with my machine without the audio dropouts I experienced before.

  4. With regard to Vista’s ZIP file extraction performance, I believe it’s generally being tested with files downloaded from the web with IE.

    Unnoticed by most people, Windows’ built-in ZIP extraction, since Windows XP, has observed the Attachment Security information in the file. If the ZIP file was marked as being downloaded from the web, it applies the same marker to all the files as they are extracted.

    The code which implements this is extremely slow. It can also have detrimental effects on the extracted files, for example CHM files (HTML Help) typically don’t work if they have the Mark Of The Web, due to Internet Explorer’s security model.

    WinZip 11.0 also adopts this behaviour. (Version 10.x may have also, but I skipped that release as it wasn’t a free upgrade from v9.0 – new versions also have a hard lockout after the evaluation period where version 9.0 told you it had expired but continued to work.)

    Going to the file’s properties and clicking ‘Unblock’, to remove the Attachment Security information, causes WinZip, at least, to speed up hugely.

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