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Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Microsoft

Microsoft releases a ton of details about Windows Vista SP1

Windows Vista SP1 overview
With the public release of the first release candidate for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 scheduled for this week, Microsoft is making a ton of documentation available explaining the ins and outs of the service pack.

In a nutshell, the update packs a ton of hardware compatibility, system reliability, performance and power consumption, and security improvements. The standalone installer will be 450MB, but if you download Service Pack 1 through Windows Update, it will probably only take up about 65MB. That's because you may have already downloaded many of the hotfixes, security updates and other features included in Service Pack 1.

Reading through the whole list of updates will probably make your eyes bleed, but here are a handful of features we're excited about:
  • Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features.
  • SP1 addresses issues many of the most common causes of crashes and hangs in Windows Vista, as reported by Windows Error Reporting. These include issues relating to Windows Calendar, Windows Media Player, and a number of drivers included with Windows Vista.
  • Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
  • Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
  • Improves power consumption and battery life.
  • Improves the speed of adding and extracting files to and from a compressed (zipped) folder.
  • Improves the speed of copying files, folders, and other media.
  • Improves startup and resume times when using ReadyBoost.
  • Users can control which volumes the disk defragmenter runs on.
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