Vista SP1 quick impressions- killed OneCare

Like people the world over I have bitten off perhaps more than I can chew and installed the recently released SP1 for Vista.  I installed it on the Fujitsu P1610 because as a device with limited resources it suffers from some of the performance problems that SP1 is intended to address, primarily slow sleep/resume times.  The install took over 2.5 hours, I don't know how long exactly because I finally went to bed after 2.5 hours.  The initial part of the install was an 11 minute period of high disk activity after which Vista provided the standard UAC "allow/ deny" dialog, something that shouldn't take that long.  The rest of the install was slow but went fine and when I returned to the Fuji the next morning the machine had restarted and was waiting for me.

I used the P1610 off and on the entire day yesterday to see what differences I could note with SP1 installed and the first thing I had to deal with was OneCare, which would no longer work.  I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall OneCare which fixed the problem and it's working fine now.  Anyone using OneCare planning to install the SP1 beta should take note of this in case you have problems.  My initial impressions of a day's usage with SP1 are muddled as I can't see any real difference.  Sleep and resume takes as long as before, I've timed that several times with both operations taking about 13 seconds.  This corresponds with what I noted before installing SP1 so I don't see any real difference here.  The Fuji still goes through extended bouts of intense disk activity occasionally so that hasn't changed.  Other than that I can't see any real differences in operation from before SP1 so at this early stage after the upgrade it's pretty much a wash.  Bear in mind that this is an early beta of a service pack so it's not indicative of what the real SP1 might be like early next year.  I had hoped that the P1610 with only 1 GB of RAM and a Core Solo processor would be a good candidate to benefit from improvements from SP1 but so far that's not the case.  That might improve over time though so stand by for further updates in this area.

NOTE:  A reader just reminded me that I had been running the OneCare 2.0 beta version and that might be why it failed after updating with SP1.  I may test that in the future to see if the beta version will work with SP1, if anyone has it working post a comment so we'll all know it works OK.

UPDATE #1:  I was downloading a program with nothing else running and got my first BSOD under Vista on the P1610.  :(

Comments

[Arne Hess]

2.5 hours is fairly long. The pure installation on my P4 3 GHz took around 25 minutes, followed by a 30 minutes configuration period with a couple of reboots (http://arne.blog.theunwired.net/?itemid=4166).

So far I've installed it on my PC only. Tablet was the next to address the same issues you mentioned above.

[GoodThings2Life]

Yeah, 2.5 hours for an SP install is absurd unless it's making drastic changes to the system.

Anyway, are you using the 2.0 beta, or the live 1.6 version of OneCare? If you're still using 1.6 like I am, you might consider taking the plunge to 2.0.

[Kevin C. Tofel]

This experience exemplifies something I alluded to a few weeks back: inconsistent experiences with Windows. My SP1 install was just under 1.5 hours and at least 45 minutes of that was file extraction and preparation. My UMPC with a slower CPU (but with more RAM) never experienced the issues that James saw on his P1610. First limited impressions for me: no difference, but then again, I never saw the disk thrashing and slow sleep / resume issues.

[James Kendrick]

No doubt the 2 GB of RAM is key with Vista in general. No one with that much RAM has reported severe disk thrashing like that on 1 GB machines.

I was running the beta of OneCare, thanks for reminding me. That may be why it failed with SP1 as MS probably didn't test that. It's running fine now on the live version of OneCare so it's probably time to try the beta of 2.0 again. :)

[Brian Hoyt]

I have over 100 Vista Toshiba M400 with 2 GB of RAM and disk thrashing seems to be all they do. It is some combination of offline files and the windows search that causes the machines to have serious issues. I am getting a test machine ready with SP1 to see the results.

[Steven Hughes]

James,

Did you install any of the KB updates that increased performance and reliability {the reliability/performance pack (KB 938194) and the compatibility and stability pack (KB 938979)} before doing SP1? Those I actually saw an increase in boot times as well as hibernate and restore as well as less disk thrashing on my P1610. I didn't notice much difference from installing SP1.

Also if you run the SP1 As Administrator by right-clicking on the installer and select "Run as Administrator" first, then it won't take as long to extract the files. If you don't from my experience it took almost 15-20 minutes just to fail through the copying of files the first time,then you finally get the UAC dialog.

Also did you have doubling of login accounts from the OmniPass software? I did when I installed the KBs, but not when I installed SP1. The fix for me was uninstalling and reinstalling the OmniPass software.

[Jake]

Hi James,

Have you noticed whether SP1 improves battery life at all as it's supposed to? Also, are you still getting that screen flashing when you dock the P1610?

I don't have any of the disk thrashing problems you mention on my P1610 but one big difference is that I don't run antivirus on it (I just don't think it's powerful enough for antivirus and prefer to take the risk of infection over a slow lappie). I'm sure my P1610 generally sleeps faster than 13 seconds as well although I haven't tested this and it seems to depend on what's running. Have you tried uninstalling OneCare for a couple of days to see if that helps? Occasionally I install NOD32 to run a virus scan and I find that my P1610 slows right down with it installed and NOD32 is about as lightweight as AV software comes.

[Jake]

By the way, I've read other reports of a 2.5 hour install for SP1. However, I guess it's important to remember that it's a beta so not everything will be perfect yet.