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Ed Bott said ‘the experience is so dramatically improved’ with Windows Vista SP1 (Springboard Virtual Roundtable)

On the Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable with Mark Russinovich, the panel discussed performance issues and common misconfigurations on Windows Vista.  Among others joining Mark were Gabe Aul of Microsoft and the incomparable Ed Bott, the scribe behind Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report.

Gabe Aul noted that "driver maturity helps a lot" and Ed offered a specific example. Link to Springboard series with MarkThen at 6:20 in the video, Ed relates an hands-on experience with one customer who purchased a notebook PC with Vista in April of 2007, and had a negative experience (with Vista RTM). Ed recalls that he contacted the customer, arranged to get the machine…

"… a year later after SP1 came out, [I] refreshed all the drivers, installed SP1 and sent it back (to the customer) who said that "I don’t even recognize this machine, the experience is so dramatically improved." 

Nice to hear.  As I posted previously back in January as we were readying Vista SP1, I reinstalled the Vista OS complete with the new service pack on to a stock Dell Inspiron 600m laptop (nothing special notebook that originally shipped with Windows XP). 

My unscientific findings: with a clean install on an old laptop, it takes only 20 seconds to recover from Hibernate, and less than five seconds to recover from Sleep.  A DVD inserted in the drive is playing in less than 20 seconds. 

Now, you can pay a retailer somewhere between $30 and $130 to optimize your new (or old) PC, or you can consider doing this yourself.  As I noted, there are several sites and applications that can help you improve PC performance by removing pre-installed items

imageWith one of our new PCs, I went through and uninstalled most of the pre-installed trialware and demoware via the Program and Features control panel.

Seeing Mark’s Springboard video, I’m also reminded that there is also Windows Sysinternals (for knowledgeable PC users), which shows you what applications are running during start up.

Back to Springboard.  At 28:45, Mark and the panel talks about Experf:

I’m having trouble finding the tool mentioned earlier, whas that Experf ? (no hits on ms.com/downloads)

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/perftools.mspx

Tags: Microsoft, performance, crapware, Windows Vista, Mark Russinovich, Springboard.

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