I was working on a customers Vista PC, when it said it needed to run a windows update. I had just installed a trial version of Office 2007, So I figured it was an update to Office.

It actually turned out to be the long awaited SP1. And I sure had to wait for it to complete.

Admittedly, Vista was running on a celeron 420 (1.6 Ghz) Acer system, with 1Gb RAM.

So I found myself waiting for the download to complete… which wasn’t too bad, at, I think, 79Mb, which is considerably smaller than XP SP2 (278Mb!).

After the download, I waited 30 minutes, while it ran and installed the SP1 package.

After that, I was told vista needed to restart. I wasn’t surprised.

While shutting down, Vista showed a “shutting down” screen, saying something like: “installing updates” Stage 1 of 3… 0% complete

Stage 1 took a total of about 60 minutes… and about 15 of those minutes were spent at 68%

Stage 2 seemed to go a bit faster… with a few sudden bursts.

Since I was just glancing at the screen every once in a while, I suddenly noticed that the PC was booting… What? did I miss Stage 3? Or maybe it flashed past in just 10 seconds?

No such luck.

After the restart, vista started Stage 3, and slowly counted from 0% to 100%

All up it took about 2 or 3 hours of waiting.

My impression of SP2?

In 10 minutes of testing (not much really), it didn’t feel any faster.

Control panel took its time (as usual) to show all the icons.

Starting and stopping applications like word and outlook seemed no faster.

Starting control panel a second time was visibly faster.

The disk seemed busier (probably doing it usual background indexing for a faster search).

Starting and stopping vista didn’t seem any faster or slower.

Memory usage (from task manager) didn’t seem any different (around 550Mb in use after startup… with little else running besides antivir).

I copied a 280Mb file (disk to disk), and the copy seemed about the same speed.

I was hoping the microsoft had downplayed the performance improvements, in order to “under promise, over deliver”… but they just delivered what they said: not much.