The editor of Redmond placed on the Service Pack 1 of Vista to accelerate the adoption of its latest OS, which had difficulty convincing in both companies as individuals. This does SP1, however, that 1 and 2% more performance.Microsoft publishes this afternoon, the first major update for Windows Vista. The opportunity for the publisher to boost its operating system, whose home is mixed with the general public and businesses.
“Vista SP1 is a new beginning for our OS,” explains ZDNet.fr, Nicolas Mirail, Windows product manager. “It will convince the remaining doubters both general public and professionally. ”
Some skeptics, Vista seems to count, even if the OS is selling well with more than 100 million licenses since its launch in late 2006. One figure is primarily due to the sale of new PC-related and not due to the enthusiasm of users. In any case, the opinion of Gartner: “Vista is seen as a market standard required but not as a technology,” we said in 2007 one of its leaders.
Gartner noted in particular that the general adoption of Windows Vista is slower than expected, and that it will become the dominant OS on the market in 2009 instead of 2008.
The same skepticism prevails on the part of businesses. De own admission Laurent Delaporte, assistant general manager of Microsoft France, “the deployment of Windows Vista is not as fast as business to the general public.”
Microsoft hopes that this first service pack will accelerate the adoption of Vista. It will also benefit from a strong communication campaign. Microsoft launches including France on Tuesday a new version of its website dedicated to french Vista, added new sections, testimonials from users and clarification on the issues of compatibility and performance.
The EDF and the Paris Firefighters pass Vista
“A lot of companies expecting this service pack to start their deployments,” says Nicolas Mirail. On his site, the publisher does not cite a single company to have completed its migration: Sew Usocome, Strasbourg firm that specializes in electromechanical equipment for enterprises (drivers). It has deployed Vista over 6000 posts.
Microsoft France ensures that the big wave is still to come with PSA, EDF, Colas (Bouygues), Les Firefighters de Paris and Credit Mutuel-CIC. In total, in the next eighteen months, two million jobs that are expected to be deployed Vista in the enterprise.
Côté general public, the publisher also thought to speed up the pace of adoption, which is 400000 Vista PCs sold each month. Next June, between 5 and 6 million PCs and Vista should have been passed in France, since the launch of the OS in January 2007. According to Microsoft, almost all PC general public are now sold with Vista up from 70% last summer.
In early April, the first PCs equipped with Vista SP1 arrive on the market. The boxes will also be available in early April, sold under the new price structure revised downwards.
Between 1 and 2% more performance
As we pointed out in our test Windows Vista SP1, this update makes the system a bit more efficient. But one should not expect a radical change. The overall system performance is expected to increase 1 to 2%, which still leaves behind Windows XP SP2.
The SP1 fixes a major bug in Vista: the ‘copy and paste large files, which can take several minutes. Microsoft argues that the gain with Vista SP1 reached 50%, especially in the case of a transfer from an external hard drive to the local disk.
In addition, the memory manager of the OS has been optimized to be more efficient, and Vista should resume soon when it is in standby mode.
Side compatibility, the Vista SP1 now to 78000 the number of components and devices through the addition of new drivers - compared to about 20000 at launch.
Note, however, that some programs have problems of compatibility with the SP1, as a result of changes it brings to the system. They include a majority of applications for security, antivirus or firewall. Some are blocked, others see their functions reduced.
Windows Vista SP1 is available today via Windows Update. The files weighing about 65 MB provided only to install new components without security fixes have already been published and with one of the five languages into English, France, German, Spanish, Japanese.
Vista SP1 is also available in full or in 32-bit version (435.5 MB) or 64-bit (726.5 MB)