Windows Vista SP1 Detailed Changes (Changelog)

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is major milestone, and probably one of the last, and best chance for Microsoft to convince enterprise and business users that Vista is now really ready for prime time. Thus, SP1 contains all previously released updates and also changes focused on addressing specific reliability, performance, and compatibility issues, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards. Microsoft had earlier revealed a little information of what’s exactly is the enhancements are. Now, if you have downloaded Vista SP1 Guides, there is comprehensive notable changes (aka changelog) and differences made by SP1 to Vista with complete details.

The SP1 changes information should close to finalized now, as the Release Candidate has been made available for download, with final version will not be too much different from RC1 build. However, the changes to drop reduced functionality mode and activation process (Microsoft calls it Windows Genuine Advantage experience) are not listed. If you lazy to download, you can read the changes here.

Hardware Ecosystem Support and Enhancements

• Adds support for new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) industry standard PC firmware for 64-bit systems with functional parity with legacy BIOS firmware, which allows Windows Vista SP1 to install to GPT format disks, boot and resume from hibernate using UEFI firmware.
• Adds support for x64 EFI network boot.
• Adds support for the 64-bit version of MSDASQL, which acts as a “bridge” from OLEDB to a variety of ODBC drivers thus simplifying application migration from 32-bit platforms to 64-bit Windows Vista.
• Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
• Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
• Adds support for SD Advanced DMA (ADMA) on compliant SD standard host controllers. This new transfer mechanism, which is expected to be supported in SD controllers soon, will improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization.
• Adds support for creating a single DVD media that boots on PCs with either BIOS or EFI.
• Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
• Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs.
• Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
• Enhances Netproj.exe to temporarily resize the desktop to accommodate custom projector resolutions when connecting to Windows Network Projectors.

Application Compatibility Improvements

Since the release of Windows Vista, the ecosystem has made great progress and the number of applications that have the “Works with Windows Vista” and “Certified for Windows Vista” logos has grown to well over 2000.

Thanks to the rich instrumentation capability of Windows Vista, we are able to understand the type of problems that our customers are experiencing (while respecting their personal information and privacy preferences). We use this information to focus improvements in Windows Vista, but we also share this information with our software vendor partners to help improve the reliability and compatibility of 3rd party applications.

It is our goal that applications that run on the Windows Vista Operating System today and are written using public APIs will continue to work as designed on Windows Vista SP1.

Microsoft has already released several application compatibility updates which will allow more applications to work seamlessly for the end user. These will appear in SP1, but are also available via Windows Update. For more information on previous compatibility updates, please refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935280/. SP1 contains additional application compatibility fixes for individual applications.

Reliability Improvements

Reliability improvements vary from PC to PC based on hardware, environment, and usage. Customers will experience varying levels of benefit.

• SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
• Improves reliability by preventing data-loss while ejecting NTFS-formatted removable-media.
• Improves reliability of IPSec connections over IPv6 by ensuring by ensuring that all Neighbor Discovery RFC traffic is IPsec exempted.
• Improves certain problem scenarios where a driver goes to sleep with incomplete packet transmissions by ensuring the driver is given enough time to transmit or discard any outstanding packets before going to sleep.
• Improves wireless ad-hoc connection (computer-to-computer wireless connections) success rate.
• Improves the success of peer-to-peer connections, such as Windows Meeting Space or Remote Assistance applications, when both PCs are behind symmetric firewalls.
• Improves Windows Vista’s built-in file backup solution to include EFS encrypted files in the backup.
• An improved SRT (Startup Repair Tool), which is part of the Windows Recovery environment (WinRE), can now fix PCs unbootable due to certain missing OS files.
• Users who did not opt-in to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) will be prompted again to join after installing SP1. The experience will remain the same and the default will continue to be opt-out.

Performance and Power Consumption Improvements

Performance improvements vary from PC to PC based on hardware, environment, scenarios, and usage, so different customers will experience varying levels of benefits. About 20-25% of these improvements will be released separately via Windows update, prior to Windows Vista SP1.

• Improves the performance of browsing network file shares by consuming less bandwidth.
• Improves power consumption when the display is not changing by allowing the processor to remain in its sleep state which consumes less energy.
• Addresses the problem of the Video chipset (VSync interrupt) not allowing the system to stay asleep.
• Improves power consumption and battery life by addressing an issue that causes a hard disk to continue spinning when it should spin down, in certain circumstances.
• Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder.
• Significantly improves the speed of moving a directory with many files underneath.
• Improves performance while copying files using BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service).
• Improves performance over Windows Vista’s current performance across the following scenarios1:
  • 25% faster when copying files locally on the same disk on the same machine
  • 45% faster when copying files from a remote non-Windows Vista system to a SP1 system
  • 50% faster when copying files from a remote SP1 system to a local SP1 system
• Improves responsiveness when doing many kinds of file or media manipulations. For example, with Windows Vista today, copying files after deleting a different set of files can make the copy operation take longer than needed. In SP1, the file copy time is the same as if no files were initially deleted.
• Improves the copy progress estimation when copying files within Windows Explorer to about two seconds.
• Improves the time to read large images by approximately 50%.
• Improves IE performance on certain Jscript intensive websites, bringing performance in line with previous IE releases.
• Addresses a problem that caused a delay of up to 5 minutes after boot with specific ReadyDrive capable hard drives.
• Improves the effectiveness of a Windows ReadyBoost™ device in reducing the time to resume from standby and hibernate by increasing the amount of data stored in the ReadyBoost device that can be used during a resume cycle.
• Includes improvements to Windows Superfetch™ that help to further improve resume times, in many environments.
• In specific scenarios, SP1 reduces the shutdown time by a few seconds by improving the Windows Vista utility designed to sync a mobile device.
• Improves the time to resume from standby for a certain class of USB Hubs by approximately 18%.
• Improves network connection scenarios by updating the logic that auto selects which network interface to use (e.g., should a laptop use wireless or wired networking when both are available).
• Improves the performance of the user login experience on corporate PCs outside of corporate environments (e.g., a corporate laptop taken home for the evening), making it comparable with PCs within the corporate environment.
• Reduces the time it takes to return to the user’s session when using the Photo screensaver, making it comparable to other screensavers.
• Removes the delay that sometimes occurs when a user unlocks their PC.
• Improves overall media performance by reducing many glitches.
• In SP1, PC administrators are able to modify the network throttling index value for the MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduling Service), allowing them to determine the appropriate balance between network performance and audio/video playback quality.
• Windows Vista SP1 includes a new compression algorithm for the RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) that helps reduce network bandwidth required to send bitmaps or images via RDP. The compression, which can be selected by administrators via Group Policy settings, is transparent to all RDP traffic, and typically reduces the size of the RDP stream by as much as 25-60%, based on preliminary test results.
• The Windows Vista SP1 install process clears the user-specific data that is used by Windows to optimize performance, which may make the system feel less responsive immediately after install. As the customer uses their SP1 PC, the system will be retrained over the course of a few hours or days and will return to the previous level of responsiveness.
• SP1 addresses a number of customer performance concerns with new print driver technologies, including XPS-based printing.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 11:05 am and is filed under Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.