Vista SP1 quick impressions- killed OneCare

Like people the world over I have bitten off perhaps more than I can chew and installed the recently released SP1 for Vista.  I installed it on the Fujitsu P1610 because as a device with limited resources it suffers from some of the performance problems that SP1 is intended to address, primarily slow sleep/resume times.  The install took over 2.5 hours, I don’t know how long exactly because I finally went to bed after 2.5 hours.  The initial part of the install was an 11 minute period of high disk activity after which Vista provided the standard UAC "allow/ deny" dialog, something that shouldn’t take that long.  The rest of the install was slow but went fine and when I returned to the Fuji the next morning the machine had restarted and was waiting for me.

I used the P1610 off and on the entire day yesterday to see what differences I could note with SP1 installed and the first thing I had to deal with was OneCare, which would no longer work.  I ended up having to uninstall and reinstall OneCare which fixed the problem and it’s working fine now.  Anyone using OneCare planning to install the SP1 beta should take note of this in case you have problems.  My initial impressions of a day’s usage with SP1 are muddled as I can’t see any real difference.  Sleep and resume takes as long as before, I’ve timed that several times with both operations taking about 13 seconds.  This corresponds with what I noted before installing SP1 so I don’t see any real difference here.  The Fuji still goes through extended bouts of intense disk activity occasionally so that hasn’t changed.  Other than that I can’t see any real differences in operation from before SP1 so at this early stage after the upgrade it’s pretty much a wash.  Bear in mind that this is an early beta of a service pack so it’s not indicative of what the real SP1 might be like early next year.  I had hoped that the P1610 with only 1 GB of RAM and a Core Solo processor would be a good candidate to benefit from improvements from SP1 but so far that’s not the case.  That might improve over time though so stand by for further updates in this area.

NOTE:  A reader just reminded me that I had been running the OneCare 2.0 beta version and that might be why it failed after updating with SP1.  I may test that in the future to see if the beta version will work with SP1, if anyone has it working post a comment so we’ll all know it works OK.

UPDATE #1:  I was downloading a program with nothing else running and got my first BSOD under Vista on the P1610.  :(

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