I’m a guest on this week’s Future Tense, Jon Gordon’s technology-focused show on public radio. He did a good job of editing a lengthy interview so I make some coherent points about Vista SP1. Give a listen.

The RTM code is now available for download by MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers.

For TechNet Plus, you’ll find the x86 and x64 standalone installers and an ISO image of the DVD containing both installers in the Top Downloads section. It is not in the Subscriber Downloads and Product Keys section yet (this TechNet Plus blog entry explains the rationale for that).

Neither site has an SP1-integrated Vista installation disk yet; that’s promised for later this month.

Does anyone want to help me take up a collection for Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal so he can replace his crappy Sony notebook? Every time he looks at Windows Vista, he runs it on this miserable crapware-infested machine and pronounces Vista worthless.

Latest installment is today’s look at Vista Service Pack 1, which Walt dismisses with this wave of the hand. Mostly because it’s not a Mac.

SP1 doesn’t resolve some of the most annoying flaws in Vista, including slow start-ups and reboots, and a security system that nags you too much and requires add-on anti-virus software. I guess these problems will either never be fixed fully or will have to wait for SP2.

My offer to Walt still stands:

[I]t seems downright unfair to pick this one sluggish machine and continue using it as the benchmark. But whatever. Walt, if you’re really interested in fixing this machine’s slow startup times, keep reading. Or call me and I’ll help walk you through it.

Somehow I don’t think I’m going to get a call.

If you have a retail, packaged version of Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, or Business, it almost certainly came with the 32-bit flavor of Vista on DVD. (Vista Ultimate comes with 32- and 64-bit media in the box.)

Want to switch to x64? You’ll need new installation media, which you can order from the form at the bottom of this page.

Oh, and you’ll have to do a clean install. You can’t upgrade from 32-bit Windows to 64-bit.

So, who’s running Vista x64? How is your experience? And if you’re thinking about making the switch but haven’t, why not? If you have any questions about 64-bit Vista, post them in the comments and I’ll try to answer here.

In the midst of an otherwise interesting account of one IT professional’s experiences with Windows Vista, Andrew Garcia of eWeek lets fly with this bit of misinformed commentary:

Aero Glass is an uninteresting resource pig, completely unworthy of all the resources it consumes. Forty percent of my system memory is consumed out of the box right now, and Aero Glass is the largest consumer. For what exactly? A 3-D ALT-TAB screen selection screen, translucent window edges and a handful of Sidebar widgets. This feature single-handedly hamstrings Vista installations with only 1GB of RAM, making slower computers swap memory with just one or two applications open.

It’s really hard to know where to begin pointing out the errors in that one paragraph. But I’ll try:

• Aero and Glass are two separate things. Aero is the full Vista interface, complete with taskbar button previews of window contents and Flip 3-D task-switching option. Glass is the transparency effect used in the Aero interface by default. It can be turned off with a single click.
• The Flip 3-D hotkey is Windows logo key+Tab, not Alt+Tab.
• Sidebar widgets have nothing to do with Aero. They run in the context of Sidebar.exe, which can be shut down at any time.
• You can run many, many programs in 1GB of RAM under Vista. The idea that you’ll run out of RAM with one or two programs open is just nonsense.

And then there’s the notion that Aero is somehow the "largest consumer of RAM" on a system. Wrong.

I have four Vista systems within arm’s reach here. Each one is running the full Aero interface, and the typical memory consumed by the Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe) is between 20MB and 36MB of RAM on each. On a system with 1GB of RAM, that adds up to a not-so-whopping maximum of 3.5% of all installed memory. If you turn off Aero and use the Vista Basic interface, RAM usage for DWM goes down to 2MB or less. But you have to push the system pretty hard to get to the point where you notice that.

I actually covered this topic in two of my ZDNet Mythbuster pieces a long time ago. They’re still valid:

Vista Mythbusters #1: It’s not a hardware hog

Vista Mythbusters #5: Aero isn’t rocket science

I hear regular complaints about Vista’s Network and Sharing Center, but when I push the complainers for details I rarely get anything more than "It’s more confusing than XP."

So I’m looking for more input from you. Do you like or dislike the N&SC? What sort of networking tasks do you regularly or irregularly perform? Are there specific aspects of Vista’s networking user interface that you find good, bad, or confusing?

Talk to me…

Microsoft’s Mike Nash has announced a change in the dates of Vista Service Pack 1 availability for technical customers:

• Late Friday we made SP1 RTM available to individuals and companies who participated in the SP1 beta program
• At the end of this week we will be making the English version of Windows Vista SP1 available to Volume Licensing customers.  Other languages will follow soon after
• Later this month, SP1 will be available to MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers

I can confirm that the downloaded packages are already on Connect for beta testers. It’s good to see MSDN and TechNet customers get some respect.

If you’re thinking of downloading a program or update (cough, Vista SP1, cough) from a source other than the official one, you really want to make sure you’re getting the real deal and not some virus-infested fake.

One way to increase your chances of getting a legitimate download is to compare the MD5 checksum of the file you download against an MD5 checksum for the file, published by a known and trusted source.

An MD5 checksum is a mathematical hash of a file that reduces it to a series of numbers and letters. If even a single bit is changed, the hash won’t match and you should be suspicious.

So, how do you compute an MD5 checksum? There are lots of tools available. I use Microsoft’s File Checksum Integrity Verifier, which is a command line tool. Unzip it into your downloads folder or some other easy-to-access location, open a Command Prompt window, and run the FCIV command, adding the name of the file you downloaded as the only argument. The result looks like this:

Compare that long alphanumeric string to the one from the known good source. If they match, you can be confident that the file you got is the same as the one you read about it. If they don’t match, hit the Delete button.

Hint: My Vista SP1 FAQ at ZDNet has the checksums for the x86 and x64 versions of the newly released Vista SP1 standalone updater.

Update: As Peter Ortner notes in the comments, you can (and should) also check the digital signature of any executable file to make sure it’s from the source it claims to be from. The signature doesn’t tell you the file is safe, only that it hasn’t been tampered with since it was signed. If you right-click an executable file that has been digitally signed, you’ll see a Digital Signatures tab:

Click the Details button for more information. For the Vista SP1 standalone installer, you should see this:

Digital signatures are definitely your friend.

…and I’ve got answers:

A Vista SP1 FAQ

Leave a comment (here or there) if you have a question I didn’t answer.

Earlier this morning, Microsoft announced that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has concluded its beta testing and has been released to manufacturing. So, does that mean you can install it today? Nope. From the official announcement:

Here’s the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:

• In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com.  Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1.  If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1.  Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
• In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically.  That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically.  As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1.  The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
• The remaining languages will RTM in April.

I’ve been running various release candidates on x86 and x64 machines for several months now and have encountered very few problems. I’ll get the RTM code this week and will have a full report then.