A while ago, I asked the PC Gamer reader brain trust to sound off on their experiences with Windows Vista after applying Service Pack 1. Vista early adopters had hoped that this would be the feel-good service pack of the year, the one that would elevate Microsoft’s flagship operating system from a glossy, confounding and frustrating kludge to a sleeker, more responsive OS that didn’t bring down framerates in games. 

 Statistically, you might expect to find a few users hating it, and few users liking it, and most being somewhere in the middle. If you were to graph this kind of response, you’d get a classic Poisson distribution, and the graph would look like the hump of a camel. But tallying the response from our readers, I get a distribution that looks more like the sphincter of the camel’s ass.



 The news wasn’t all bad. Out of a little over 50 responses I’ve received by now, about 12% were very happy with the results. They didn’t check a box that said “very happy” or anything like that, but I gleaned it from responses like these:

“Installing Windows Vista SP1 made a huge difference in the performance of the Aero interface. I m running a lower-end PC with only 1GB of RAM and an Nvidia 7300 LE video card, and before the service pack my PC was almost unusable when using the Aero interface, and now it actually runs fairly efficiently.”

“Prior to SP1 my nForce network adapter would occasionally drop Internet connectivity. SP1 seems to have eliminated that problem. I also noted that others on my LAN used to encounter a small delay before they could see my shared folders, and this seems to have been corrected by SP1 as well. Overall, Vista is much more stable.”

“Vista SP1 works quite well on my gaming rig and drastically improves file copy times. I switched for the DX10 effects and with SP1 the performance hit is less 5 percent. More the worth it for the new visuals.”

“I’ve noticed that my Dell laptop starts up and shuts down faster. My desktop had file copy issues and those were cleared up as well. Overall, I’m really happy with SP1 and I see no reason for people to be slamming it or Vista overall.”

Well, unlike the last commenter, about a third of our responders did see a reason to slam Vista—both SP1 and overall—as evidenced by the following responses, which have been heavily edited to conform to our community standards on language:

I had purchased a new PC with Vista Home in early February and had tons of trouble with it. However, I was able to load several older games that we love. [After SP1], five of those same old games I was able to load on the first PC now refuse to load or run.

I am running Vista 64-bit and SP1 failed to install properly, like many programs under Vista.

I was forced to reformat and reinstall Vista after SP1 made my installation go bad!

SP1 made Sleep and Hibernate mode useless. I tried the free Microsoft SP1 support (they even called me for free after a long chat wait), and it sucked. After troubleshooting for hours, I uninstalled SP1 and still had the problem. Finally, I restored a disc image I made right before the install and the problem is gone. I am now trying to decide whether to try SP1 again.