Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is out!

The wait is finally over! Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is now available -free of charge of course- in windows update. You could also download it directly from Microsoft’s website, a 700+mb download if you do so, yikes! The 120+mb download from windows update was hell to install. It kept failing until I did a cold reboot and stopped all processes but the update itself. On first glance, the installation alone caused problems.

As for my experience, there are no major differences before and after Service Pack 1. Though my Windows Media Player is smoother now. It used to hang all the time. Memory allocation is better too. For a full list of the supposed “improvements” and changes, take a look here CLICK.

Now on to the not so good news. When installing SP1, it does warn you that it causes problems with proprietary drivers and issues a warning. Kakatakot nga eh, pinapa back-up ka pa ng files. Payo narin sa inyo mga kapatid, mag back-up nga kayo. There have been lots of reports on Vista breaking their computing experience (CLICK ) and I was worried it might happen to me to. Pero sige, for the sake of the community I installed it.

So far, my experience has been a bit nightmarish. After installation an old IDE Hard Disk Drive which I use to archive my files stopped working. Also, I lost a major boot file that will allow vista to boot! I had to do a manual repair and restore the files to boot again! Also the errors that I used to get like driver timeouts (especially Nvidia video drivers) are still present. And, certain incompatibilites with other programs like the New York Times reader where I get my financial/business reports.

All in all, Vista Service Pack 1 isn’t that convincing to make others switch to Vista from XP. In fact, its twitchy at best. For those who are tech savvy, go for vista if you’d like to tame it. If you’re not, stay with XP and avoid sleepless nights and bluescreen nightmares.