I’m runnin a stock Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB of RAM. I counted 108 apps total and gave up bored after I had running anything from Photoshop, Visual studio 2008, Office professional 2007, Safari, and Media Centre all the way down to that resource hog, Minesweeper.

This fascinates me at oh-so-many levels:

• How the heck do you have 100 graphics applications installed in your computer in the first place?
• Why do people still care about this kind of things?
• What do you people really care about when it comes to the performance of your computer?
• How comes we haven’t had any Linux user telling us he’s running 250,000 apps simultaneously on six different monitors.
• How many applications can the Beamz run?
• And finally, how many graphical apps can you run in your computer without it burning down in flames?

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. Please write your opinions and personal benchmarks in the comments.

PC World: “Pre-SP1, the [1.9GB] file copy averaged 384 seconds; post-SP1, the copy process showed a noticeable improvement, averaging just 348 seconds to complete the same task. That’s a 9 percent improvement, a difference you’re likely to notice… It’s not life-altering when you’re talking about just 2GB of data, but if the performance improvement holds across larger data sets, that will be a big boon to anyone copying data in the Vista environment.”

PC Mag: “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… even with Office 2007 Professional, Adobe Creative Suite CS3, and Norton System Works 2008 on the machine and various components of each running (Outlook, Word, InDesign, Acrobat, and Norton AV, for instance), the drive light stayed remarkably unlit on the SP1 clean install. This issue bears watching: If the difference turns out to be as significant as it seems, then it alone is reason to upgrade.”

Anandtech: “Compared to where we were a year ago, our general recommendation for Vista is unchanged. We are however impressed with the progress of the x64 versions of Vista over the past year, after feeling like it was lagging behind Vista x86 from beta up through the release version of Vista. Vista x64 is now clearly on par with Vista x86 and we have no concerns about its compatibility or performance.”

CNet: “Do you need Windows Vista SP1? Yes and no. It’s always good to install the latest (read: patched) code for any operating system. But downloading and installing the update will take some users a few hours without any visible or tangible improvements to their systems.”

Giz Commenters:
We received a huge response to our poll question the other day, “How’s Windows Vista SP1 working out?” Most of you didn’t notice much of a difference after the install, but a good portion of you thought it was either the best or worst decision you’ve ever made. Here are some of the most informative things your fellow commenters had to say about the upgrade:

Topcat: Installed without incident in ~20 minutes for me. RAM use is down 7-10% on average from the OS (Ultimate-32), and it fixed some of the problems I’d had frequently

shiftyeyedgoat: I can definitely notice a difference in network transfer speeds. I mean, it’s multitudes faster.

Claystil: My startup time seems to be shorter and windows connects to the network MUCH faster.

JoeStalin: No difference. Large file transfers still suck ass.

Darrone: …it boned my computer harder than Eliot Spitzer at Scores.

The majors seem to echo what everyone else has been saying; while updating is usually the right thing to do, SP1 doesn’t have enough noticeable changes to make you jump out of your seat. The commenters were more outspoken in their distaste for the update, some even reporting several crashes, but overall they seemed to like it as well. Putting all of the feedback together, we’re going to give Vista SP1 an “upgrade” verdict, but don’t expect too much from it.

Today however, Windows Update tells me I have one important update to install on my 64bit Windows Vista Home Premium-based system – Windows Vista Service Pack 1 for x64 based Systems (KB936330). Other users don’t yet seem to have been prompted for the install and even my own x86-based Vista laptop doesn’t have the update available.

Could this be an strange occurrence or a hoax? Any of you have got the same notification? Tell us in the comments. (Yes, wrong headline. Fixed.)

Update: according to news.com, Microsoft is withdrawing SP1 for Vista. ‘We’ve heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287,’ wrote Nick White, Microsoft project manager. ‘Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.’” [Hexus - Thanks Parm Mann and Slashdot]

SP1 doesn’t resolve some of the most annoying flaws in Vista, including slow start-ups and reboots, and a security system that nags you too much and requires add-on anti-virus software. I guess these problems will either never be fixed fully or will have to wait for SP2.

That’s a Stinger. Missile.

It not only basically calls Microsoft inept, each bit is an unspoken comparison to OS X. SP1 has, however, gotten better than its RC, which we tested a couple months ago. Whereas it took 30 percent longer to transfer files over the network than regular Vista in our test, Moss says transfers took half as long. Recovery time is better from sleep and hibernation, and rebooting is about the same, once it relearns your most frequent programs—a point I think Mossberg unnecessarily belaboured, to my horror.

His overall verdict though is what I think is slightly weird: “On balance, the update is probably worth installing, especially since Microsoft will deliver it automatically. But I wouldn’t rush to grab it and I wouldn’t expect much from it.”

It’s fine to be disappointed (I was when I installed the RC1), and most of his criticisms are valid, even if you can see glimmers of 10.5.2 comparisons between the lines. But it’s a service pack. A mild recommendation makes little sense (vs. a do-not-install warning, which could be perfectly warranted). You’ve pretty much gotta install it at some point. [All Things D]

This means better stability, faster file handling and improved device compatibility. It also contains some future proofing, including support for DirectX 10.1, UEFI firmware and ExFAT flash-memory file format. On the subject of overall speed, some early Battlemodo action suggests that there’s a nice bump here.

In terms of reliability, Microsoft tells us, “SP1 users likely to have fewer disruptions,” defining a disruption as anything from a full-on system crash to the likelier application failure. Microsoft quantifies this with “average time between disruptions.” Initially on Vista, you could go about 17 hours without a disruption, now it’s double that at 34 hours between disruptions. When I asked about how this compared with XP, Microsoft said it was a tough comparison, since they lacked the detailed telemetry on XP. (Perhaps this is a convenient shortcoming.)

As you might have heard, Microsoft is also claiming that, security wise, Vista is not only better than XP but that it’s better than Linux and Mac OSX as well, using security updates to 10.4 Tiger in the first year as a comparative example. [Microsoft]