LEAKED: Vista SP1 analysed in-depth

It's no secret that there's a leaked beta of Vista SP1 floating around, but no-one yet has really taken the time to analyse it in detail to find out what it really does.

I made it my mission this weekend to trawl through the registry and file changes in SP1 to find out as best I could exactly what SP1 does.

First up, I can say that there is a very noticeable performance increase. It is obvious that since Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing, it has been optimising the code ever since. (I suspect this revelation will fuel the fires of the people who say Vista was released before it was ready for prime-time.) There’s far less hard drive thrashing and in general the system seems much smoother and more responsive.

Amusingly, the build of SP1 we saw (which in this beta comes fully integrated into a 3.2GB Vista install DVD, rather than as a standalone update) still has Microsoft's internal network shares embedded as the source of the updates. For example:

\\\\winbuilds3\\longhorn_SP1Beta1\\longhorn_SP1Beta1
\\6001.16549.070628-1825\\x86fre\\packages\\ServicePack"

Not that that info is really useful to anyone, but it mildly tickled our curiosity bone (next to the funny bone) to see the file layout of Microsoft's internal distribution shares.



Vista SP1Vista SP1

The first noticable change is obviously the version number. Windows Vista has a build number of 6.0.6000, whereas this build is 6.0.6001 (full version number is 6001.16549). This is quite interesting as one of the much-anticipated (and officially acknowledged) changes in SP1 was to bring the Vista kernel up to the same kernel as that used in Windows 2008 (version 6.1). It's possible that this aspect of the service pack is still in development, and not included in this version of the private beta.


Vista SP1 Build NumberVista SP1 Build Number

Normally, service packs don’t include new features – Windows XP SP2 being the standout exception. By and large this seems to be true of Vista SP1, although there is a new maintenance application called “Create a Recovery Disc”. This isn’t the same thing as creating a backup of the system to DVD – instead this process creates a recovery DVD which you can use with system recovery options if you don’t have an original Windows DVD or you can’t access OEM recovery tools.


Create Your Own Recovery DiscCreate Your Own Recovery Disc

At this point in its development, SP1 comes installed with four updates:

* Service Pack for Microsoft Windows (KB936330)
* Service Pack for Microsoft Windows (KB937286)
* Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB937287)
* Update for Microsoft Windows (KB938371)

There is a full list of suspected hotfixes that were to be included with Vista SP1 (check them out at www.vistasp1.net), but these four are not on the list. Unfortunately as the beta is not yet public, there’s no publicly-accessible information out there about these updates.

However, some hours of digging around in the registry did uncover quite a bit of information, mostly to do with the package load of each update and the Windows components it influences (bear in mind that this information is current for this particular version of SP1 – it may change in the public beta and in the final release).


Poking around in the registry: reveals a surprising amount about the private life of an OS updatePoking around in the registry: reveals a surprising amount about the private life of an OS update
Service Pack for Microsoft Windows (KB936330) contains 133 individual packages and is by far the biggest of the updates, so will probably be the service pack as we think of it. It is applied to the following Vista components:

* AxInstallService
* Backup
* BLB Client
* Branding Ultimate Client
* BRCpl Basic/Premium/Pro & BRCpl Basic/Premium/Pro Language Pack
* Capture Wizard
* Client Features
* ClipsInTheLibrary
* CodecPack Basic Encoder/Package
* Desktop Manager
* DFSR Client Edition
* Disk Diagnosis
* Fax Client (for all versions of Vista)
* Foundation
* Group Policy Client Extensions / Client Tools
* Help Core Client
* IIS WebServer AddOn (38 packages are devoted to this component)
* IIS WebServer (another 18 packages for this component)
* Indexing Service
* Media Center / Media Format / Media Player
* MobilePC Basic/Premium/SideShow
* MovieMaker
* MSMQ Client
* NetFx3 OC
* NFS Client
* Offline Files
* Optical Media
* Parental Controls
* Peer-to-Peer AdHoc Meetings / Full
* Photo Basic/Premium
* Previous Versions
* Printing Foundation / Printing Premium Tools / Printing XP Services
* RDC (Remote Desktop Connection)
* RecDisc
* Remote Assistance
* Removable Storage Management
* Secure Startup
* ServicingBaseline (for all versions of Windows)
* Shell Inbox Games / Premium Inbox Games
* Simple TCP
* SNMP Package
* SUA (Subsystem for UNIX Applications)
* System Restore
* TabletPC OC
* Telnet Client / Telnet Server
* Terminal Services Command Line Tools / Misc Redirection / USB Redirector / WM Provider
* Windows Foundation Language Packs
* WMI SNMP Provider
* WMP Network Sharing Service
* MSSSVC Rules (for all versions of Vista)
* Server Help (for all versions of Vista)

Service Pack for Microsoft Windows (KB937286) contains 28 packages. The bulk of the updates are applied to the Windows Help Core Client, but it also affects client packages for:

* Windows MobilePC (Basic, Premium, SideShow and Help)
* Windows ServicingBaseline (for all versions of Windows Vista)
* Server Help (for all versions of Windows Vista).

Hotfix for Microsoft Windows (KB937287) contains just one package, which is applied to the Servicing Stack, a component used in Vista imaging.

Update for Microsoft Windows (KB938371) contains three packages, which are applied to:

* OS loader
* Windows Task Scheduler Service
* Windows Update Standalone Installer (WUSA)
* Foundation Package
* Common Log
* Delta Package Expander
* OLE Automation
* All Windows Foundation and WindowsPE Language Packs

The services packs are very clearly directed towards backend services rather than frontend features. I pointed the SP1 system to Windows Update to see whether it needed any Vista updates, and it didn’t. So as expected, all Vista updates since Vista was released (and there haven’t been many) have been bundled into SP1.

The Vista SP1 packages: you can uninstall them from the SP1 build if you so desire, and return to bog standard Vista RTM.The Vista SP1 packages: you can uninstall them from the SP1 build if you so desire, and return to bog standard Vista RTM.
Performance and Compatibility

This service pack isn’t to be confused with two enhancement packs which were leaked to the public a few weeks ago, and then officially released by Microsoft with virtually no fanfare on the 8th and the 9th. These two updates address compatibility and performance features in Vista.

The “compatibility” update (KB938194), “improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista” in the following scenarios:

* The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
* 932539 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932539/) The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver on a Windows Vista-based computer
* The computer stops responding, and you receive a "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer's power button.
* The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations.
* The Diagnostic Policy Service (DPS) stops responding when the computer is under heavy load or when very little memory is available. This problem prevents diagnostics from working.
* The screen goes blank after an external display device that is connected to the computer is turned off. For example, this problem may occur when a projector is turned off during a presentation.
* There are stability issues with some graphics processing units (GPUs). These issues could cause GPUs to stop responding (hang).
* Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.
* You experience poor playback quality when you play HD DVD disks or Blu-ray disks on a large monitor.
* Applications that load the Netcfgx.dll component exit unexpectedly.
* Windows Calendar exits unexpectedly after you create a new appointment, create a new task, and then restart the computer.
* Internet Connection Sharing stops responding after you upgrade a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP to Windows Vista and then restart the computer.
* The Printer Spooler service stops unexpectedly.
* You receive a "Stop 0x0000009F" error when you put the computer to sleep while a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connection is active. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
* 931671 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931671/) Error message when you put a Windows Vista-based computer to sleep while a PPP connection is active: "STOP 0x0000009F"

The “performance” update (KB938979), “improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista” in the following scenarios:

* You experience a long delay when you try to exit the Photos screen saver.
* A memory leak occurs when you use the Windows Energy screen saver.
* If User Account Control is disabled on the computer, you cannot install a network printer successfully. This problem occurs if the network printer is hosted by a Windows XP-based or a Windows Server 2003-based computer.
* When you write data to an AVI file by using the AVIStreamWrite function, the file header of the AVI file is corrupted.
* When you copy or move a large file, the "estimated time remaining" takes a long time to be calculated and displayed.
* After you resume the computer from hibernation, it takes a long time to display the logon screen.
* When you synchronize an offline file to a server, the offline file is corrupted.
* If you edit an image file that uses the RAW image format, data loss occurs in the image file. This problem occurs if the RAW image is from any of the following digital SLR camera models:
o Canon EOS 1D
o Canon EOS 1DS
* After you resume the computer from hibernation, the computer loses its default gateway address.
* Poor memory management performance occurs.

That last one is wonderfully vague. And I’ve certainly experienced the “estimated time remaining” problem, so I’ll be applying that particular update.

Both updates are available for 32- and 64-bit versions of Vista.

Because the packages bundled into the service pack aren’t labelled by their KB number, it’s hard to say with certainty whether these updates have been incorporated.

There are many rumours flying around as to when SP1 will be released, but there's nothing really concrete. The best that can be said is that the public beta is due later in the year, with the final release happening sometime in 2008.

The big question is whether the hint of a service pack on the horizon will encourage businesses to hold off deploying Vista, especially if they're contemplating Windows Server 2008 as well. This isn't a situation Microsoft wants, but if it's generally known that Vista SP1 has substantial advantages of non-SP1, it's difficult to make a business case for early adoption.

Personally, I haven't had too many problems with Vista to speak of, but if this private beta is anything like the final release, it can’t come soon enough. I want those performance improvements on my main desktop machines!

XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates: Redux

We recently published an article comparing framerate performance in XP versus Vista on NVIDIA hardware. Our readership wanted to see what ATI could do with the same task so that we could see if Vista was really to blame for what we saw.

Introduction

We recently published an article that compared framerate performance between Vista and Windows XP in multiple current gaming titles. We wanted to do this because there were many claims that Vista was a poor gaming operating system, or at least that it didn’t perform as well as XP on the same hardware. Up to now, it’s been claimed that poor driver support has crippled Microsoft’s new operating system. We wanted to try to associate hard numbers to this issue and take an industry accounting of what users can expect from Vista. We even went so far as to test two different video cards and driver sets. Both were from NVIDIA, and included a 7600 GS and an 8800 GTS 320MB.

However, our scope was more limited than we realized. After the article, a consistent criticism was that we did not include ATI hardware in our evaluation, so any claims that we made were unqualified. Our readers were absolutely right. One of the reasons that our content is better than most publications is that because we have the best readership in the industry and we listen to them.

It wasn’t a conscious effort on our part to specifically exclude ATI hardware from the original article. It was merely the fact that we had NVIDIA hardware on hand at the time, so we used it. Given ATI’s track record lately, we simply did not have any ATI cards on hand in our former [H] Consumer offices in Austin. The original plan was to just use one video card, but later we thought that two would be better. Who knew that three was actually the right number? We also wanted to keep the experiment as simple as possible. We wanted the article to be about operating systems, not hardware. For this reason, including ATI wasn’t at the forefront of our minds.

Another criticism was that we used "old" drivers from NVIDIA. This was mostly very bad timing. The article was in its very last stages when the new drivers were released and had already been written and approved for publish (not a quick or easy process). That said, it would definitely have been best to include the latest drivers in the article. We simply didn’t know that new drivers would be coming out. As of late, NVIDIA has been of little help as they don’t know when their own drivers are pushing out. To address this issue in this ATI article, we contacted ATI to ask them when their next driver release would be. They did us one better – they gave us the beta drivers that were going to be released as WHQL on May 23rd, which are now known as Catalyst 7.5. In this instance, we’re dealing with the latest and greatest. And just for good measure, we took a few of the games that performed extra-poorly with our NVIDIA hardware in our last article, and gave them another run on the new 158.18/158.22 drivers to see if there was any effect.

Test Set-Up

The test will be conducted essentially exactly as before, except that we now have an ATI X1950XTX 512MB as our video card. The rest of the system is as before, provided by Puget Custom Computers.

Again, we will be using the former [H] Consumer gaming line-up, which is what was used in the previous article. As before, we will be mirroring our gaming experiences between the two operating systems as closely as humanly possible. Some titles are easier because of saved games and consistent bot behavior. Others are more difficult because of the complexity of the AI in the game.

Battlefield 2142

We had no problems with getting this title to run on the new hardware. This game was a bit difficult to test because there is no save game option and the AI behaves differently every time. We did our best to stay in the same area of the map between sessions…and not die.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Company of Heroes

We had no problems getting CoH to run on our system. Installation, patching, and gameplay went smoothly and caused no issues on the ATI video card and driver set.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

We also had no issues with this title. In our 30 Days with Vista article, we experienced an anomaly where the floor of our opening sequence jail cell swallowed Uriel Septim and the game was unable to progress. Thankfully, we experienced nothing like that and the ATI hardware was able to play this title without any problems.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Flight Simulator X

We experienced a strange event while launching this title. For a game that was designed with Vista in mind, it surprised us that the UI had to change from Aero to “Vista Basic” for the game to run. None of our other titles required this. Otherwise, the game installed and played perfectly fine.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Need for Speed: Carbon

As in our previous article, we experienced some weirdness with this title in Vista. On the ATI driver set, we had crashes to desktop as soon as we double-clicked the icon and the game attempted to launch. We set the program to run as the administrator and run in XP SP2 compatibility mode, but still no dice. We went online to check for a solution and found out that you actually have to use Windows 98 compatibility mode to run this game. Once we had that selected, the game ran without any problems. As with the 8800 GTS in our previous article, we couldn’t get FRAPS to show up to do our framerate capture. It turned out that we had to set FRAPS to run as the administrator as well for it to work in Carbon.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Prey

Again, Prey was a problem in Vista. We had to set the game to run as administrator and select XP SP2 compatibility mode for the game to run. We had to also set FRAPS to run as the administrator for it to function in the game. Otherwise, gameplay was smooth and we experienced no problems.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

The Sims 2

We had no problems running this title. Installation, patching, and gameplay went off without a hitch on either OS.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

World of Warcraft

We had some major problems getting this game to patch under Vista in our previous article, but we did not experience those issues in this case. After we successfully patched our game, the ATI blazed through the game without any issue.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

NVIDIA Hardware Revisited

As we stated in the introduction, we wanted to see if the new 158.xx driver revision from NVIDIA had addressed some of the significant performance gaps that we observed in our previous article. We retested on the 8800 GTS 320MB and only included the games that seemed most affected by either the operating system or poor support from NVIDIA.

Battlefield 2142

Per our previous experience, we had no problems with getting this game to run.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Company of Heroes

This game also presented no problems.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

We also had no issues with this title.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Need for Speed: Carbon

As in our previous article, we had to set Carbon to run in Windows 98 compatibility mode and FRAPS also had to be set to run as administrator.

Graphics Settings

Image Quality – Vista on Top

Conclusion

We presented each game individually, but here they are all together.

As a comparison, here are the graphs from our previous article with NVIDIA hardware.

The results for ATI were largely very impressive. On ATI hardware, we saw that there was generally only a modest difference between XP and Vista in performance. In our previous article, we noted dramatic framerate discrepancies between the two OSes and perhaps drew a bit too much attention to Windows Vista as being the common denominator. As our readers noted, it would have been better to qualify those statements by stating that our experiences were with NVIDIA hardware alone, and it’s not possible to tell if the problem is intrinsic to the operating system, the NVIDIA hardware or driver revisions, or possibly all of the above.

We’ll make that distinction now – the implementation of the driver revision that we used for our NVIDIA hardware was woefully underperforming in a Vista environment. Again, NVIDIA recently released a new driver set, and we wanted to see if there was any effect in some of the games that were disappointing when run under Vista. From the graph above, we see that the new driver set has closed some of the gaps, while others remain wide open. This is interesting to see, as ATI seems to largely have its ducks in a row concerning Vista.

We were intrigued by the 158.xx revision of the NVIDIA driver set as some games showed marked improvement since our last go-around. However, some titles still exhibited large performance gaps - notably, Need for Speed: Carbon. It's important to note, however, that EA has not patched this title since before the retail release of Vista (about six months ago). Between the recent developer patches and perhaps the new driver revision, the performance gap for Company of Heroes closed to a much more reasonable interval.

It's still very interesting to see the overall trend, though. Even on ATI hardware, seven of our eight gaming titles showed a higher framerate in XP over Vista. In the one case where Vista outpaced XP, it was by an average of 0.9fps. Even on the new NVIDIA drivers, our panel showed the same trend.

Now that we've used new drivers and a more comprehensive panel of hardware, we're at a point where we have to look at this profound trend in the data as significant. Even though it's only by a few frames here and there, it's curious to see that Vista continues to underperform (albeit slightly in most cases) in 3D gaming applications compared to XP.

We hope that this follow-up has placated some of the curiosities about what ATI is doing to make sure that gamers are happy with their gaming experiences in Vista. It’s obvious now that ATI should have been included in our previous round-up as it would have been an interesting contrasting element and would have made the article more complete. In effect, NVIDIA got a pass while we put the blame on Microsoft. From our results, it looks like some blame still does go to Microsoft, but it's also clear that NVIDIA's previous driver revision was largely underperforming. We want to express our thanks to our readers for their thoughts and always holding us accountable for the content that we produce.

Source: enthusiast.hardocp.com