Now Available Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to download

The much anticipated service pack has now been released. Get your hands on the new release.

The release mainly focuses on addressing specific reliability, performance, and compatibility issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards.

Some details about the SP 1:

Reliability Improvements

Reliability improvements vary from PC to PC based on hardware, environment, and usage. Customers

will experience varying levels of benefit.

• SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes

• Improves reliability by preventing data-loss while ejecting NTFS-formatted removable-media.

• Improves reliability of IPSec connections over IPv6 by ensuring by ensuring that all Neighbor
• Improves wireless ad-hoc connection (computer-to-computer wireless connections) success rate

• Improves the success of peer-to-peer connections, such as Windows Meeting Space or Remote

Assistance applications, when both PCs are behind symmetric firewalls.

• Improves Windows Vista’s built-in file backup solution to include EFS encrypted files in the

backup.

• 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.

Performance and Power Consumption Improvements

Performance improvements vary from PC to PC based on hardware, environment, scenarios, and usage,

so different customers will experience varying levels of benefits. About 20-25% of these

improvements will be released separately via Windows update, prior to Windows Vista SP1.

• Improves the performance of browsing network file shares by consuming less bandwidth.

• Improves power consumption when the display is not changing by allowing the processor to remain

in its sleep state which consumes less energy.

• Addresses the problem of the Video chipset (VSync interrupt) not allowing the system to stay

asleep.

• 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 scenarios:

• 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 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.

• Improves the copy progress estimation when copying files within Windows Explorer to about two

seconds.

• 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.

• 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).

• Improves the performance of the user login experience on corporate PCs outside of corporate

environments (e.g., a corporate laptop taken home for the evening), making it comparable with PCs

within the corporate environment.

• 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.

• SP1 addresses a number of customer performance concerns with new print driver technologies,

including XPS-based printing.

Security Improvements

• Windows Vista SP1 includes all previously released Security Bulletin fixes which affect Windows

Vista.

• Service Pack 1 includes supported APIs by which third-party security and malicious software

detection applications can work alongside Kernel Patch Protection on 64-bit versions of Windows

Vista. These APIs have been designed to help security and non-security ISVs develop software that

extends the functionality of the Windows kernel on 64-bit systems, in a documented and supported

manner, and without disabling or weakening the protection offered by Kernel Patch Protection.

• Improves the security of running RemoteApp™ programs and desktops by allowing RDP files to be

signed. Administrators now have the control to differentiate the user experience based on the

publisher’s identity.

• Data Execution Protection (DEP) is a memory-protection feature available beginning with Windows

XP and Server 2003. SP1 improves security with a new set of Win32 APIs to allow programmatic

control over a process’s DEP policy. This will provide application developers with finer control

on a process’s DEP settings for security, testability, compatibility, and reliability.

• Improves the trustworthiness of data presented in Windows Security Center (WSC) by ensuring

that only authenticated security applications can communicate with WSC.

• Improves security in smart card scenarios:

• Enhances the BitLocker encryption support to volumes other than bootable volumes in Windows

Vista (for Enterprise and Ultimate SKUs).

• Adds full support for the latest IEEE draft of 802.11n wireless networking.

• Updated drivers are delivered primarily via Windows Update and directly from hardware vendors,

not as part of a service pack. However, a small number of critical drivers are included as part

of Windows Vista (e.g., display drivers, audio drivers) and some of these have been updated.

For more Details See

Notable changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1

Download

Windows Update(For Home Users)

Standalone Update (Size 450-500MB)

X86
X64

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