Windows Vista SP1

Walt Mossberg's February 14th column at All Things Digital has a good preview of the upcoming Windows Vista Service Pack 1. It looks like a lot of download time and bandwidth (65 Megabytes worth) for very little performance gain.

Mossberg says "based on my tests of Vista SP1, I believe that for most average consumers, it will likely be a nonevent, and for others it will be disappointing. For mainstream users, it adds no significant, visible features to Vista, and changes little or nothing about the way the operating system looks and works."

He goes on to say that most of the annoying Vista flaws, such as slow system start-up and reboots, and the security system prompts of do you want to do this remain unresolved.
His best comment is late in the review, where he says "To my horror, I found that SP1 actually made rebooting — already slower than on comparable Windows XP computers or Macintoshes — even slower. Microsoft explained that this was due to the fact that installing SP1 erases certain data used by Vista to speed up program launching. It takes the system a few days to build this data back up, the company says. Until then, it says, overall performance, including reboots, can be slower under SP1 than under original Vista."

But I'm not really seeing that it takes that much longer to startup or reboot. Besides, users don't really have much choice about these kinds of things - not installing updates and service packs makes no sense. Large corporations won't continue remaining on Windows XP two years after Vista shipped. They've made a plan for migration and are moving forward with Vista, sometimes slowly.

For small businesses, or home users, unless you just want to deal with a total software reload, or love the cutting edge (assuming your hardware can support it), just stick with XP. And Mac users - yeah you made a good decision.