Performance Differences of Windows Vista SP1

The time Vista takes to return from hibernation mode has dropped markedly (by about half, in fact); it takes even less time with my clean install. Wake time was a major irritation when using Vista RTM, not only for laptop users (a fact Microsoft quickly recognized) but also, from my experience, when running the OS on desktops. With both the download install and the clean install of SP1, I no longer have time to make coffee after pushing the power button on my desktop PC to bring it out of hibernation. Better still, with drive access no longer constant, I can start work (or play) that much more quickly.
Still, extracting from compressed folders on my machine showed an improvement of roughly 25 to 30 percent, while copying large folders (12GB was the largest I tried) demonstrated speed increases of about 20 percent. For local folder transfers, Vista still isn't up to the speed of Windows XP running SP2, although according to my informal observations it's within 10 percent. On my machines, the updated OS extracted from compressed folders almost twice as quickly as XP, but then again, unless you regularly work with gigabyte-size compressed folders, you're unlikely to notice a practical difference. What Microsoft does publicize is an improvement in the speed of copying files—both between local drives and from local drives to network shares—as well as the speed in extracting files from compressed folders.
My results show an improvement, but nothing to get excited about, unless you do such copying frequently and with large files and folders. This kind of improvement is vastly more important in the enterprise sector, of course (where pushing files to network shares goes on all the time) than for individual users. My clean installation of Ultimate with SP1 unquestionably behaved more snappily than either the original Vista or Vista with SP1 downloaded and installed. Snappiness refers to the speed at which menus respond, windows are redrawn, programs and data files open and close, and so forth. From the beginning, Vista had some significant issues with excessive hard drive use. The drive light would routinely stay fully or mostly lit for many minutes at a time, even when most programs had been closed. The downloaded SP1 improved this quite a bit, resulting in crisper performance, but the clean installation has improved the situation enormously. Then again, the clean installation has fewer programs installed, so you can't make a direct comparison.

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