So I upgraded to Vista SP1 last night

As you probably heard Vista SP1 was released to Windows Update on Tuesday.   Full list of updates can be found here.  I decided to take the plunge last night and offer up my most sacred and highly used machine - an Alienware Area 51 9750 laptop.  To say I am in love with this beautiful piece of technology would be an understatement.  From the way it looks to the way it performs it is pure geek joy.  SP1 was either going to make it or break it on this machine.

I loaded up Windows Update - Selected SP1 - clicked Next and then hoped for the best.  Forty minutes later everything was installed and my machine had finished booting back up.  It was worth mentioning too that windows update detected some out of date drivers (that had been tested to be non-sp1 compliant) prior to installing SP1 and upgraded them for me.  In fact it wouldn't let me install SP1 until I did - saving me from creating a bad situation for myself. 

First thing I noticed was Windows actually reporting the full 4 gigs of ram:

Time for the next test. Besides all the IIS7 improvements in SP1 (features straight from Windows Server 2008), new APIs and bug fixes there was one thing I just had to check out.  The DirectX 10.1 update of course.  After all it can't be all work and no play right?  I was pleased to find that both my graphics scores had gone all the way up to 5.9 previously being 5.8 and 5.7 respectively.  I re-ran the test three times just to make sure it wasn't a fluke but the scores remained. 

Feeling pretty confident I decided to put the new file copy speed to the test as well.  My test subject was the Visual Studio 2008 directory.  Coming in around half a gig and almost 7,000 files it would be a great test.  To my surprise the estimate started out around 1 minute and 45 seconds and never went over 2 minutes and 30 seconds.  I was also getting some amazing throughput - 3.26MB sec. Check it out...

Overall I am pleased with the upgrade.  The file copy speeds alone makes it worth the price of admission but when you add on things like DirectX 10.1, developer and IIS7 improvements I would definitely recommend checking it out.  The machine seems to be running a bit peppier and I ran through a couple Visual Studio 2008 WPF and Silverlight projects, did some encoding in Expression, and loaded up a bunch of docs in Office 2007 all with with no appcompat hiccups.  Oh, and World of Warcraft runs fine too. =)

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