By the way, I’ve read other reports of a 2.5 hour install for SP1. However, I guess it’s important to remember that it’s a beta so not everything will be perfect yet.

Hi James,

Have you noticed whether SP1 improves battery life at all as it’s supposed to? Also, are you still getting that screen flashing when you dock the P1610?

I don’t have any of the disk thrashing problems you mention on my P1610 but one big difference is that I don’t run antivirus on it (I just don’t think it’s powerful enough for antivirus and prefer to take the risk of infection over a slow lappie). I’m sure my P1610 generally sleeps faster than 13 seconds as well although I haven’t tested this and it seems to depend on what’s running. Have you tried uninstalling OneCare for a couple of days to see if that helps? Occasionally I install NOD32 to run a virus scan and I find that my P1610 slows right down with it installed and NOD32 is about as lightweight as AV software comes.

James,

Did you install any of the KB updates that increased performance and reliability {the reliability/performance pack (KB 938194) and the compatibility and stability pack (KB 938979)} before doing SP1? Those I actually saw an increase in boot times as well as hibernate and restore as well as less disk thrashing on my P1610. I didn’t notice much difference from installing SP1.

Also if you run the SP1 As Administrator by right-clicking on the installer and select “Run as Administrator” first, then it won’t take as long to extract the files. If you don’t from my experience it took almost 15-20 minutes just to fail through the copying of files the first time,then you finally get the UAC dialog.

Also did you have doubling of login accounts from the OmniPass software? I did when I installed the KBs, but not when I installed SP1. The fix for me was uninstalling and reinstalling the OmniPass software.

I have over 100 Vista Toshiba M400 with 2 GB of RAM and disk thrashing seems to be all they do. It is some combination of offline files and the windows search that causes the machines to have serious issues. I am getting a test machine ready with SP1 to see the results.

No doubt the 2 GB of RAM is key with Vista in general. No one with that much RAM has reported severe disk thrashing like that on 1 GB machines.

I was running the beta of OneCare, thanks for reminding me. That may be why it failed with SP1 as MS probably didn’t test that. It’s running fine now on the live version of OneCare so it’s probably time to try the beta of 2.0 again. :)

This experience exemplifies something I alluded to a few weeks back: inconsistent experiences with Windows. My SP1 install was just under 1.5 hours and at least 45 minutes of that was file extraction and preparation. My UMPC with a slower CPU (but with more RAM) never experienced the issues that James saw on his P1610. First limited impressions for me: no difference, but then again, I never saw the disk thrashing and slow sleep / resume issues.

Yeah, 2.5 hours for an SP install is absurd unless it’s making drastic changes to the system.

Anyway, are you using the 2.0 beta, or the live 1.6 version of OneCare? If you’re still using 1.6 like I am, you might consider taking the plunge to 2.0.

2.5 hours is fairly long. The pure installation on my P4 3 GHz took around 25 minutes, followed by a 30 minutes configuration period with a couple of reboots (http://arne.blog.theunwired.net/?itemid=4166).

So far I’ve installed it on my PC only. Tablet was the next to address the same issues you mentioned above.