Vista SP1 Improvements

Microsoft has finally posted a reasonably descriptive overview of what’s included in Vista SP1. As I’ve already blogged, I think Vista is more than a little slow and bloated. I know other people who are concerned with Vista’s reliability, but unfortunately I have not yet gotten there (I find Vista’s performance too lacking to have used it enough to run into reliability issues).

Update 3/23/2008 – On my laptop, I upgraded RAM to 4GB, and purchased two fast hard drives: one for Windows + Pagefile, and one Development tools + MSSQL.  Performance is now much better, and usually satisfactory.  I’ve also installed Vista SP1 and don’t have any complaints so far, so I’m leaning toward thumbs up.  Prognosis: faster hardware on Vista is better, and SP1 agrees with my computer.  I still hope Vista SP2 dials up the performance a bit more, but… I’d really like Windows 7 to focus on performance and simplification.  Note to Microsoft: Please don’t change the driver model in Windows 7!! Enough already, of upgrade pain and compatibility woes!

Here are Vista SP1 improvements I find interesting:

• Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
• Addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
• An improved SRT (Startup Repair Tool), which is part of the Windows Recovery environment (WinRE), can now fix PCs unbootable due to certain missing OS files.
• Adds full support for the latest IEEE draft of 802.11n wireless networking.
• Improves OS deployment by enabling 64-bit versions of Windows Vista to be installed from a 32-bit OS. This will allow IT professionals to maintain just a single WinPE image.
• Improves patch deployment by retrying failed updates in cases where multiple updates are pending and the failure of one update causes other updates to fail as well.
• Enables reliable OS installation by optimizing OS installers so that they are run only when required during patch installation. Fewer installers operating results in fewer points of potential failure during installation, which leads to more robust and reliable installation.
• Improves overall install time for updates by optimizing the query for installed OS updates.
• Improved instrumentation allows additional data to be sent to Microsoft via the CEIP (Customer Experience Improvement Program) when enabled. This telemetry data led to the identification of numerous issues that are addressed in SP1 and resulted in improvement in the reliability of OS servicing.
• SP1 reduces the number of UAC (User Account Control) prompts from 4 to 1 when creating or renaming a folder at a protected location.
• Improvements in the Licensing User Interface and User Experience including more details in the help about activation and what happens if user does not activate; more detailed and descriptive dialog text; raw error codes replaced with easily comprehensible text.
• While not reflected in the initial release candidate this week, we will also be making changes effective with SP1 in how we differentiate the experience customers have using non-genuine versions of our software. This is based on feedback we heard from volume license customers in particular as part of our Windows Genuine Advantage program.
• Improves the performance of browsing network file shares by consuming less bandwidth.
• Improves power consumption and battery life by addressing an issue that causes a hard disk to continue spinning when it should spin down, in certain circumstances.
• Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder.
• Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files underneath.
• Improves performance while copying files using BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service).
• Improves performance over Windows Vista’s current performance across the following scenarios1:
  • 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
  • 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
  • 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system

• Improves the time to read large images by approximately 50%.
• Improves IE performance on certain Jscript intensive websites, bringing performance in line with previous IE releases.
• Improves responsiveness when doing many kinds of file or media manipulations. For example, with Windows Vista today, copying files after deleting a different set of files can make the copy operation take longer than needed. In SP1, the file copy time is the same as if no files were initially deleted.
• Addresses a problem that caused a delay of up to 5 minutes after boot with specific ReadyDrive capable hard drives.
• Improves the effectiveness of a Windows ReadyBoost™ device in reducing the time to resume from standby and hibernate by increasing the amount of data stored in the ReadyBoost device that can be used during a resume cycle.
• Includes improvements to Windows Superfetch™ that help to further improve resume times, in many environments.
• In specific scenarios, SP1 reduces the shutdown time by a few seconds by improving the Windows Vista utility designed to sync a mobile device.
• Improves the time to resume from standby for a certain class of USB Hubs by approximately 18%.
• Improves network connection scenarios by updating the logic that auto selects which network interface to use (e.g., should a laptop use wireless or wired networking when both are available).
• Reduces the time it takes to return to the user’s session when using the Photo screensaver, making it comparable to other screensavers.
• Removes the delay that sometimes occurs when a user unlocks their PC.
• Improves overall media performance by reducing many glitches.
• Windows Vista SP1 includes a new compression algorithm for the RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) that helps reduce network bandwidth required to send bitmaps or images via RDP. The compression, which can be selected by administrators via Group Policy settings, is transparent to all RDP traffic, and typically reduces the size of the RDP stream by as much as 25-60%, based on preliminary test results.

Microsoft also lists a bunch of other improvements. If you want to get it directly from the horse’s mouth, please follow this link. And then download the file named: Notable_Changes_in_Windows_Vista_SP1_ Release _Candidate.doc

Vista Usability (Drivers)

Last year when Windows Vista shipped, I enthusiastically installed this latest-and-greatest Microsoft Operating System on a couple of my computers. I was quickly dismayed to find it completely unusable on both computers because Vista drivers that I required were not available.

One of my computers could not see the internet because Vista didn’t ship with a driver for my network card. This was a bit of dark irony as Microsoft was really pushing the message: “Vista ships with bunches of drivers, and many more are freely available online!” Since my computer lacked a Vista network card driver, I couldn’t connect to the internet and… thusly I could not download new ones. So, in my situation, what good was it that Microsoft was busily posting new drivers on Microsoft Update? Hopefully, Microsoft documented this Lesson-Learned from Vista: When shipping a new Operating System, don’t forget the Network Card Drivers.

I installed Vista on another computer, and… Vista could not see my SATA hard drive. This really was unfortunate as this XP-based computer had been reliably using the SATA hard drive for years. This drive contained all my data: music, photos, videos, work documents, spreadsheets, application source code, databases, etc. So, even though I could boot Vista and access the internet, I could not actually use this computer for work, or for leisure. In this case, I could access Microsoft Update to check for new drivers but… none were available for my SATA hard drive.

I was a little disappointed, but mainly confused. The Microsoft’s PR machine was loudly broadcasting the news that Vista shipped with an amazing quantity of drivers. In fact the actual language was something like: “Vista ships with more drivers than XP had when it shipped”. On a large scale, I feel the Microsoft PR machine was really communicating this broader message: Run, don’t walk, to your favorite computer store and buy Vista today! Because this OS will work with your hardware, and you will be happy!

At least, that’s the message I took away from Microsoft’s marketing colossus. Looking back, I’d wasted a dozen hours and was considerably less than happy.

What I find slightly dishonest with this marketing tact is: statistics can be made to lie. Let’s look at the situation from a different and truthful angle. Vista did ship with a bunch of drivers, but many mainstream and very functional computers could not run Vista because drivers were not available. Bunches of people purchased Vista and quickly realized that drivers they needed were not available for their existing hardware. I wonder if anyone has readily available statistics showing that when it first shipped, Vista ran on a smaller percentage of available hardware than XP did when it first shipped.

Now that Microsoft has had a year to improve Vista, they’ve been working like the world’s biggest hive of busy-bees. I sincerely hope Microsoft’s extensive hierarchy of executives and management has been focusing on the right things. I guess you could say: that’s why they get paid the big bucks. And, that’s why we consumers are paying the big bucks to them.

In Microsoft’s defense, they have developed a bunch of drivers over this past year. And good new for me: the driver I require for my SATA hard drive (NForce2 SATA controller) has been developed (by Microsoft) and published a couple months ago (by Microsoft). So, I can now use that computer with Vista, but in all truthiness I think Microsoft was about a year late.

My personal opinion regarding non-cutting edge hardware: driver development is the responsibility of the operating system maker. Case in point: Nvidia was not going to develop my SATA driver because… Nvidia won’t see a dime of profit if they developed the driver (but Microsoft will profit from more Vista sales). In fact, Nvidia officially stated that nForce2 hardware was “too old” and they are only developing Vista drivers for NForce3. So, about a year after Vista ships… Microsoft finally develops and ships the NForce2 driver. Problem solved… about one year too late.

As I like to say: software is always a work in progress because it’s never really done. Instead, software continually delivers different levels of user satisfaction to different users. It’s up to the software maker to continually make the right decisions. Hopefully, Microsoft will re-focus on: the end-user, quality, performance, reliability and usability. If they don’t… I’m increasingly becoming enamored with Mac OS-X.

 

Performance Reset

You may have seen news articles and blogs related to Vista SP1 and its performance increases (or the lack of). What people are upset about (myself included), is Microsoft officially says that Vista SP1 brings performance increases. The only problem: people can’t find these performance increases.

Let’s back up for a minute. Years ago, when Microsoft was receiving an onslaught of negative press and reams of customers were being directly affected by Microsoft’s lack of baked-in security… Microsoft had the wisdom to stop current product development and review millions of lines of code. Software source code (aka: application logic) was reworked in Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft developer tools, and much of the other software produced by Microsoft. This group of significant actions became known as the “security reset”. And this really was major deal where normal software development was put on hold, so software across the board could be reviewed and fixed with a critical eye on security. In part, this security reset became a significant part of Windows XP SP2. During (and after) this period Microsoft instituted some fairly strict policies on security. These policies were communicated to external (non-Microsoft) developers. Overall, this was a major deal that took concerted effort within Microsoft.

Personally, I think Microsoft now needs a performance reset. As I have said in some of my previous posts, I think software in general, and Microsoft software in particular, is getting slower at faster rate than hardware is getting faster. And this problem acutely affects Vista. I think Microsoft needs a performance reset where development is put on hold and everyone looks at how we can improve performance. The caveat is: managers and executives don’t really like to do this because it affects product schedules, resource tasking, new product releases, and revenue streams. This affects marketing, development, testing, management, and pretty much anyone taking part in the development process.

But, I think some sort of significant performance reset is exactly what Microsoft needs to regain competitiveness. All hope is not lost, but too many applications are getting slow and piggy (at least from my vantage). And, too much negative user feedback and press is voicing this issue.

Back to Vista SP1. Microsoft is publicly saying that Vista SP1 will bring performance increases to the table. SP1 users/reviewers are saying otherwise. What bugs me about Vista’s SP1 performance “improvements” (other than people don’t see them), is I think Microsoft is doing performance improvements in a top down fashion. Such as: what areas of Vista need the most improvement. This is a good start, but a more holistic approach would couple this top-down strategy with a simultaneous bottom-up Performance Reset. Where developers actually put their work on hold, and review code to make the 6 million ton behemoth (Vista) faster.

Mary Jo Foley has dug a little deeper and uncovered the inside scoop on Vista SP1 and performance improvements: Microsoft hones its internal sales pitch for Vista Service Pack 1

Operating System Of The Future (Vista)

I guess this is as good a time as any to voice some gripes I have with Microsoft’s latest and greatest desktop Operating System. Granted, it’s pretty common (even expected) for Microsoft’s newest OS to take some heat. So before I delve into my grips with Vista, in the spirit of tradition, let me first chronicle some complaints with prior Windows releases.

Way back when DOS users were introduced to Windows, there was a good bit of backlash. And, I for one, initially resisted moving to Windows. DOS worked and made sense, so why change a good thing, eh? The first few versions of Windows piggy backed on top of DOS, which affected performance and reliability (and to me, degraded my user experience).

When Windows NT 3.1 came out, detractors immediately bemoaned the expensive hardware it required: the quantity of RAM, the faster CPU and hard drive. With the release of NT 4.0, people complained they were just being sold a revamped UI (which was not completely true). I still remember when Windows NT 4 would get corrupted and you’d need to re-apply Windows Service Packs to try and fix it.

I had good friends certain that Windows 95 “was a fad”, and they were sticking with Windows 3.11 (and DOS) until Windows 98 came out. Then Windows 98 came out and people complained it was less stable, slower and required more RAM than did Windows 95. A year later Microsoft shored things up with Windows 98 Second Edition, but there were still detractors. When Windows ME came out, people complained very loudly (but I think ME complaints were often justified, as I consider it the worst Windows OS ever).

When XP shipped, people complained because it looked like eye candy that required more hardware… and it didn’t appear to bring much worthwhile to the table. But over time people did warm to XP, especially years after XP SP2 was released (i.e. today).

I think adoption of an OS is best described as maturation. Just as XP matured with new service packs, people warmed to XP’s nuances and capabilities. People learned how to use it, and how not to use it. This maturation is a two way street where all parties have adapted.

Over time Microsoft saw how people (and software) worked on XP, and the Windows development team was able to fix more bugs, polish errata and improve the end user experience. In effect, this maturation was a feedback cycle where Windows XP, Windows XP users, and the Windows XP development team gradually became sync’d together. Until this happened, users were working against the OS, because the OS was working against the users. And Microsoft was stuck in the middle (or, depending on your vantage, the users were stuck in the middle).

Enter Vista. Five long years after XP shipped, Microsoft finally delivered their latest and greatest desktop OS: Windows Vista. As with virtually all previous Microsoft operations systems, detractors immediately surfaced. Since I’ve been through a bunch of previous Microsoft OS launches, I have gotten pretty good about sitting on the fence and not immediately complaining. In part, I don’t want to complain about something that is not real, but I also want to personally evaluate something (and build my own experience). Now, that I’ve had a year to play with Vista, I do have some gripes. These are my personal views, so please digest with a bit of salt.

Performing my typical workflow (i.e. using my typical software) Vista provides noticeably lower performance than does XP. My issue is not that Vista just requires faster hardware (because most every new Microsoft OS has required faster hardware). My issue is that Vista requires faster hardware than is reasonably available. Then, pile on top of that: Computer makers are selling bunches of Vista on machines with mid and low-end hardware. Hey! That’s a great way to build a dissatisfied user base!

Case in point: RAM. Vista is doing some sophisticated things with caching data in RAM. This really is an interesting idea, where the OS puts all available RAM to good use. But… to take advantage of this, you really need between 2 GB and 4 GB of RAM. Sure the minimum system requirement for Vista is 512 or 1 GB (depending your own Vista Roulette) but my personal take: that’s nuts! Even 1GB is nuts-o! You surely don’t want to go lower than 2GB because performance will likely suffer. But you cannot go higher than 4 GB, because that’s as much as 32-bit hardware supports (without AWE, which is best suited for servers and specialized platforms such as SQL Server). So, a range of 2GB or 4GB is an awfully small window of configurability. And, since it’s best to go with 4GB, your configuration is pretty much predetermine: You can either have 4 GB of RAM or 4 GB of RAM. This is a lot like what Henry Ford originally offered for auto color choices: Black or Black (58th best quote every: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”). Maybe this issue of RAM will be a major driver of Windows 64-bit adoption.

Let’s also consider hard drives. Vista seems to push hard drives a lot harder than XP. I recently purchased a brand spanking new 17 inch Sony VIAO with dual-core Intel Core 2 processor and 2GB of RAM. And performance was just terrible. I thought: “How could this be? This is a pretty powerful machine, and Microsoft and Sony have had a year to address performance and usability!” But, my purchase offered anything but performance and usability. I tried Office 2007 and performance was bad. Booting was really slow, shutting down was also slow. Running various applications were slow. I tried running development tools (Visual Studio 2005) and performance was just the absolute pits: compiling my medium sized project (250k lines of native C++) took six times as long as it did on my 4 year old Windows XP desktop. After a lot of sleuthing, I determined the root cause: a slow hard drive. And the version of Vista that came with this laptop, Vista Home Premium, prohibits disk write caching (a clever mechanism to make a hard drive faster than it really is).

I can only surmise that important Microsoft executives decided the Home variants of Vista needed to provide lower performance, which unfortunately resulted in my poor user experience. So, I was hit with a double whammy: Vista is too slow for my hard drive, and Microsoft executives decided my new computer’s hard drive needs to suffer a performance penalty since I chose the wrong Vista variant during my shopping Vista Roulette.

A few months back, I went on a business trip to Microsoft’s campus to do some P&S (Performance & Scalability) work with the SQL Server team. In addition to getting to work with the zen-like SQL Server team, an additional perk was a visit to the Microsoft Campus store, where I quickly picked up a copy of Microsoft Vista Ultimate Edition. Now, flash back to the present. To enable disk write caching on my VAIO, I’ll just upgrade my Vista Home Premium to Vista Ultimate, then performance will be… well, better! But it turns out that Microsoft prohibits this upgrade path (Upgrading Home Premium to Ultimate is blocked by Microsoft – I again blame the executives). The thing that really bugged me is this should be technically possible. Microsoft blocked the upgrade when I entered my retail purchased Ultimate key, and Microsoft blocked my upgrade when I ran the Vista Ultimate upgrade wizard. The only thing I can surmise is Microsoft figured there was some financial benefit to blocking the Home to Ultimate upgrade path.

So, I did a complete re-install of Vista Ultimate, downloaded drivers from Sony, and reinstalled my applications. With write caching enabled, performance did improve. But not by very much. And, building software with my Vista laptop is still much slower than my XP desktop. Even the most basic actions such as copying, renaming, and deleting a single file is noticeably faster on my 4 year old XP desktop. This was slightly upsetting considering Vista aggressively caches data in RAM, so hard drive performance is theoretically not as important. So, I now realize my Vista laptop needs a much faster hard drive. I should probably upgrade the RAM to 4GB as well. Hmm… Maybe purchasing mid-level hardware was a bad idea with Vista. 12/27/2007 Update: Computer makers appear to agree that Vista Notebooks need 4 GB of RAM.

I’ve also installed Vista on my 4 year old desktop in a dual boot configuration, where I can boot into either XP Professional or Vista Ultimate. Due to my performance and usability bias, I more often use XP. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I find performance a critical piece of usability. If an application, or OS, offers significantly sub-par performance, I’ll quickly ditch it (when possible). A bunch of new bells, whistles, and improved security just don’t (currently) warrant my use of Vista. I am not an eye candy consumer. I’m not particularly enamored with Vista’s DRM. In fact I am much more concerned with substance, such as: functionality, simplicity and performance. I know incredibly talented Microsofties. And, I know many people have pored years of their lives into developing Vista. I also know it is in Microsoft’s best interest to deliver software solutions that meet (or, ideally exceed) consumer expectations. As of today, Vista does not meet my needs. But maybe after some performance and usability maturation of Vista, and performance improvement in hardware, we’ll see Vista as the Microsoft OS for today. Until then, I think to some degree, Vista will be the Operating System of the Future.

I would like to close by saying there really are a lot of major improvement that are promising in Vista. For a quick overview, please check this out (Wiki):

An articles that initiated this post: Top ten terrible tech products (cnet.co.uk)
Another article that initiated this post: The Vista Death Watch (Dvorak)
An example of what I consider “executives not getting it”: Ballmer blames pirates for slow Vista adoption (arnnet)
Also interesting: The history of Windows NT (Wiki)

Performance and Usability

It looks like Vista SP1 may not provide much of a performance increases: http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/vista-sp1-performance-dud.html

If this is true, then it really is a shame, because my experience with Vista has definitely left me wanting for more performance. With light use of the OS (i.e. web browsing and email) I don’t feel Vista has that much lower performance than XP. But, when I use more system intensive application such as Developer tools (Visual Studio) or even basic Shell usage (copying, renaming and deleting files in Windows Explorer), Vista seems really slow. Actually, painfully slow.

My personal opinion is: Microsoft tried to push too many unproven technologies into Vista too quickly (which is ironic considering how late the OS was). And performance was never properly baked in. This unmanaged complexity resulted in an OS that is overly slow, unreliable, and immature. When I say immature I mean: it’s going to take a while for Vista to mature to the point where it’s generally considered the accepted Microsoft OS. This really isn’t any different from XP, where I’d argue that SP2 delivered maturation to XP. The big difference in my mind is: XP was never a bloated, wallowing, performance lackey.

Microsoft openly considers security critical (as they should), but when it comes to performance, it seems like they couldn’t care less… and I don’t really like that, because for me: Performance Is A Significant Part Of Usability. And, it’s not just the Vista team that is delivering a product with poor performance. I find the performance of Microsoft Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2005 also lacking. Especially Visual Studio 2005, which I consider was designed by and for executives (and not for the actual enduser).

It is generally accepted as conventional wisdom that new versions of software get bigger and slower, but I observe major Microsoft products getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster. To restate more clearly: Major Microsoft products get more sluggish than hardware gets faster.

So, I’m probably staying with XP a while longer until Microsoft addresses Vista performance. Maybe I’ll transition my main computer to Vista if I get an insanely powerful workstation…. But maybe I’ll just wait for Microsoft to fix Vista.