Service Packs & Season's Greetings

Well, following Michael's post last month about our collective Vista experiences, I write this as the proud installer of Vista SP1 RC, a.k.a "a-bit-better-than-beta". And I have to say I'm noticing a world of improvement.

Unzipping my test 1mb / 1000 image file showed a significant improvement on Vista's previously flakey zip function. An action that previously took an astonishing 20 minutes (compared to WinRar's 15 seconds) now took a mere 18 minutes!

Network copying of files was noticeably improved, now only giving me chance to get as far as the milk-adding stage of my cuppa.

Stability of applications also seems more solid, with Dreamweaver only giving me an out of memory error if I have Illustrator open and Outlook, which is forgiveable given that my Core Duo only has 2GB of RAM to play with. And the icons on Photoshop's tool palette now only inexplicably vanish at most 30% of the time, which has significantly improved my workflow.

There's plenty of other improvements too, and more I'm sure will emerge over time. But suffice to say I'm glad I held out for SP1, and didn't lose heart entirely.

... now... where did I put that standalone XP disk?


Vista humbug aside, the festive season is close upon us. So I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all our clients, suppliers, friends and colleagues a Merry Christmas from us all at Wordsun Web Works.