Windows Vista SP1 Improves Speed Up to 86% Faster
Is Vista SP1 really the shot in the arm your Vista system needs? We’ve spent many hours strapped to our benchmarking system in a caffeine and pizza fuelled haze to uncover these very interesting results.
We tested Vista:
* as it comes out of the box (RTM — or “release to manufacturing”)
* as it comes out of the box, with all Windows Update patches applied (”RTM patched)
* with the final SP1 service pack applied
Testing Setup
Although Vista SP1 has many documented improvements, we aimed to test a particular scenario which has proved to be a major problem for pre-SP1 users: file copy speed, particularly over a network.
Our scenario was a home user running Vista Home Premium on a fast, low-latency network with decent PC hardware. All file copy tests were initiated from the main machine.
Our test machines were:
* Main machine - an Acer Veriton 7900 Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo 6700/4GB RAM/ATI RADEON X1950/2xSATA-II HDD) running Windows Vista Home Premium
* A second machine running Windows Vista Home Premium (connected via gigabit Ethernet for file copy tests)
* A third machine running a fully-patched Windows XP SP2 installation (connected via a dedicated gigabit network to two remote systems).
Each system used the latest available vendor (non-Microsoft) drivers and the November release of DirectX. No modifications were made to the operating system, so as to represent as closely as possible the configuration of an OEM machine.
We uses two test file batches – the first was a single 2.5 GB ISO, and the second was 2.5GB of small files (over 300 MP3s). Each file batch was copied to a remote destination (write), and then written back across the wire to the test system (read/write).
The file copy destinations were:
* the second hard drive in the main testing system
* a SanDisk Cruzer Micro 8GB USB flash drive
* the remote Vista system
* the remote XP system.
File copies were timed from the time “Copy” was clicked to the time the copy shell disappeared.
We also ran PCMark Vantage across the test systems to get an overall impression of system performance.
The aim of the tests was to see how changes in the test machine’s patch level affected performance.
We therefore ran the tests three times – once with Vista Home Premium RTM, once with all the available patches applied from Windows Update, and once with SP1 RTM applied.
The secondary Vista system was also patched to maintain consistency between it and the test machine.
The XP system was unchanged throughout the tests, running fully patched XP SP2.
Hard drives on all the three systems were defragmented before each file copy test.
Source: Vista SP1 up to 86% faster | APC Magazine
Tags:benchmark, benchmarking system, config, copy speed, defragment, gigabit network, Hardware, HDD, machine, microsoft drivers, Operating system, Performance, rtm, test system, usb flash drive, vista system, Windows, windows update, windows vista
March 9th, 2008 at 6:15 am
Well we have tested SP1 RTM on 5 machines,DELL, ASUS, and three Home built intel chipped boards.It slows each machine down. There is a noticable drop in performance on each one. The only up side was that System file checker now actually works and finishes its scan.
There is a lot more CPU usage going on in the background that wasn’t there before and startup & shut down is a lot slower.
I do not understand what has been fixed with SP1 because all of our PC’s ran better without it.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
I recently ran tests [with Vista Home Prem RTM and then with SP1] using several folders of files ranging from 183MB to 3.34GB. Used Lenovo T61 laptop, HP 6157 PC [both 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB ram] and various combos of 8GBSD card, Fujitsu USB pocket harddrive and a WesternDigital MyBook 500GB external drive using 3 interfaces: eSATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire. Results were mixed.
Generally the SP1 copies were faster. 20% to 81% faster than RTM in most of the cases. There were strange unexplained exceptions at times to which interface was fastest, etc. The eSATA was often the fastest as expected but NOT always. Best speed seen under any combination was 23MB/sec. By far the majority of cases were much slower — in the 5 or 6MB/sec range. Smaller folders tended to copy at faster MB/s rates than did larger folders. Complex folders (e.g. 18,000 mixed Office files in 700 folders) copied much slower rate wise than did “simple” folders with few subfolders and fairly uniform file sizes (like 397 jpeg files that totalled ~400MB.) I have yet to see any logic to any of these empirical results. I have heard obscure theories but nothing logical. I’ve seen credible claims by reliable Sr. users who say they get 20 to 30MB/sec file copy rates using Win XP and 2 harddrives on the same machine using ATA interfaces. I do not get anywhere near those speeds.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Once your moderation has been completed how about an email telling me if there is further comment on this thread?
Tks.
May 18th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
A correction/update to my May 16th copy speed information. Since then (all using an eSATA drive off the HP 6157; Vista SP1 and using ReadyBoost) I found file types that copy much faster. A 23 GB folder of MPEG video files (.m2ts files)copied at 48.6MB/s — by far the fastest copy of large folders I have seen. Also, a 2.6GB folder of mp3 audio files copied at ~ 32MB/s using the same setup.