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Vista updates improve compatibility, performance
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 9th August 2007
The new updates fix several issues, improving compatibility, performance and reliability.
The two patches were leaked last week, but are now officially available through Microsoft’s knowledge base. They’re available for all versions of Microsoft’s latest OS and weigh in at around 12MB combined for the 32-bit versions of Vista and 18MB combined for x64 versions.
The first of the two patches, KB938979, addresses some performance issues that have been widely reported, including the issue with file transfer speeds and poor memory management amongst others. Although I’m yet to experience the file transfer issues myself in full effect, I know that many others have had issues with transferring large amounts of data.
The second patch, KB938194, addresses compatibility issues that seem to mostly be related to graphics drivers or gaming. This will be good news to many bit-tech readers, then.
Having already installed the patches, I can say that my Vista experience has improved a little – I’ve noticed my file transfers are slightly faster and I’ve not suffered from any graphics-related crashes since. Having said that, my Vista experience has been pretty good so far – I seem to be one of the lucky ones.
How has your Vista experience been so far? Have you suffered from any of the problems that these patches address, and if so, has it fixed them? Let us know in the forums.
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Comments (49)Stats: 0.045 seconds
Sam
Sam, while I think about it, we got another Vista code on MSDNAA, just go to purchase the x64 edition :)
So is Vista actually as fast, stable and reliable as XP? Should I as a close-to-hardcore gamer change? And no dual-booting. :)
Yeah, the audio thing is the only reason I'm not using Vista right now. While I *do* like the new way you can change the volume of individual applications, and generally the sound is better there are still occaisionally crackles. I don't know if that's Vista (I was using a 'trial' version of 64bit Ultimate) or the drivers for my X-Fi. If it was Vista, I would have thought it would have improved by now. As audio was the biggest complaint I had during the beta testing phase, a lot of games I played the sound would start to crackle, and get worse the longer I played.
That and Civ4 Beyond the Sword tripping UAC (unlike Civ4 Vanilland & Warlords).
@Brooxy, i know, ive got both keys, 64bit is on the Tower while the other key is on the beasty lappy which again is stable and very nippy even with 1gb of ram.
Sam
I think myself lucky to have stereo audio wihout crackle then :/
Allthough my freind had the same stereo audio issue on his X-Fi we did not notice any crackling, due to OS and drivers now being RTM and not beta?
GAH! THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM!
RAM is there to be used, not sit unused!
One question though: Which version should I go for? Business 32? 64? Or Ultimate 32? 64?
Vista USES your RAM! It's what it's there for. It stores data in the RAM after it's been used so that if you want it again your data is there and available quickly!
Linux has done it for decades, my linux indicates the 80% of my RAM is in use at any point in time.
You'd think it would be obvious really wouldn't you? :D
It gets on my tits, people have been lulled into the "Use less RAM" because Microsoft had crap memory management!
Please people, this must have been said about a thousand times accross the community. A large chunk of Vista's memory usage is due to precaching technologies which store data for future use...
I myself turn defender and defrag off but I recommend you turn the rest back on. With indexing you're disabling one of the best features of Vista. Superfetch increases responsiveness and UAC, my God don't turn it off, I can't stress how much of a bad idea it is to run every process with admin priviledges. You can disable the prompt if you so desire but turn UAC back on.
EDIT: For those like me who installed the leaked beta patches a few weeks ago, they're exactly the same as this version.
I KNOW what RAM is made for! But jusk to piss you off: Why should I store data in my RAM that I might eventually maybe need later? I agree that's something to argue about but just my 2 pence added here.
more cpu time used when a program starts or a program starts demanding more ram as the operating system has to decide where to get the ram from etc. instead of just giving the program a load of address which it knows is free.
As for linux... the ram usage is less than vista but more than xp on most of my boxes. It seems to keep a percentage free as the more ram you add the more it uses.
Because ram is a lot faster than your disk...
And there isn't anything to argue about. It simply makes a lot of sense.
Is it possible to run Vista x86 on 64-bit processors?
How would I go about swapping my OS to Vista 32-bit Edition?
It works fine :) But requires a full reinstall.
I use the x64 and it works great. Lots of things SAY they don't have drivers, but if you just right-click in device manager and set it to "update driver" it will miraculously find one. I had these problems with my wireless card, for instance.
Assuming that your motherboard's onboard NIC is recognized. Which Vista does a very good job of doing, actually.
I may be an odd one, but I assemble my computers and get them all updated and patched up near two things - a working second computer, and a wired net router. THEN I take them where they'll spend their working lives. But then again, I may just be jaded from too many of those "everything you need is right in the box..." experiences.
hmmm ok it would be ignorance to vista then, was never really that interested in anything in it other than DX10, so when a game is launched vista removes stuff from the ram to fit the game?
how does vista compare to xp then in games (fps wise) and benchmarks like super pi
In terms of FPS Vista is close, within 10fps of XP. But shoddy drivers so far have tainted the view.
Superpi is identical for me.
Vista actually has a new memory manager, so it's not just resource hungry, it's managing that memory in a totally different (and better) way.
Sorry for being annoying, maybe not my day. ;)
// edit: @ Ramble: Just a quick question: Is Vista still destributing RAM to other devices such as GFX cards? My 8800GTS/640 had 8xx or more MB of memory to address under Vista. Just wondering.
hmmmm thats interesting then lol, so how much ram does vista use if you get rid of the caching
Well no, because it depends what performance you're measuring. As said already, SuperFetch is designed to predict what apps you use and when, and will thus have those apps and files waiting in RAM for you. It's fairly obvious there's a performance increase over it having to pull everything from the HDD.
RAM is never erased. When a program requests some ram and there isn't any available because the cache is taking up too much room all Windows has to do is to mark the cached data as no longer cached in its cache manager and then hand the memory to the program. The data that was cached is still loaded in RAM, but that doesn't matter because the new program will be writing its own data over the top of it before it uses it.
When your writing a program if you request some RAM and you dont assign a value to it and then you print the value that is in the RAM you requested out to the screen you will find that it is just whatever it was used for last.
Of course this would take a few extra CPU cycles to mark that the data that was cached is no longer cached, but this most likely would take less than 1ms. It is also likely if you were running a game that most of the requests for more RAM would be during the loading phase and so it would have almost no negative effect while you are actually playing.
I dont mind if 80% of my memory is used (infact 99% would be better, im sure theres a reason you cant use all 100%), but i would like to know how much of it can actually be freed, and how much is really being used
They do.
EDIT: There's clearly some ambiguity here as to what happens, so I've taken a screenshot some my mem usage.
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1417/1075104774_9a34e14a80_o_d.png
As you can see system processes are using up about 800mb (it changes depending on how much ram you've got). The rest is taken up by cache so I've only got 18mb free, however this is transparent so rather than 99% mem usage I have 40%. it changes depending on what you run, for example I did a stress test earlier, it used up 1.88GB of RAM and only a few hundred meg was left for the cache. After I closed the program the cache rebuilt back up to 1 gig or so.
It's basically free memory.
so why does it use more than twice the ram xp does? is 2gb enough for gaming on vista if so for how long
It uses twice the memory due to a combination of things, one thing is that indeed Vista does have more processes and is indeed heavier on the memory. It also has a new memory manager which may be skewing things somewhat, by paging less and such. Memory usage drops as you remove RAM.
Remember (40% of 2) > (44% of 1). Vista actually went ahead and made use of the extra RAM I put in.
but they should have another row that says "used" or something, because if you actually quote the free figure, you are getting skewed by the cache
you can work it out, in that SS apparently you are using 542mb memory (total - free - cached) but it should be written down somewhere
;)
reading through the thread I was feeling the urge to post along the same lines till I got to your post, I probably wouldn't have done it as well and don't feel like I have as much authority on the matter though.
To check I had it right though, my layman's explanation is something like :
So you have however possible numbers in an array which always exist regardless of the numbers in them at any given time, it takes some time to enter meaningfull numbers to all the spaces to use, but almost no time to update the list that says what the numbers are to "___ to ___ = available" which just lets the next program to want memory, change the list entry and start replacing whatever numbers are already in the section it wants to meaningfull numbers of its own, taking no longer than it would have because its replacing say a 029 instead of an 000 in an entry.