Evening everyone!

As most of you will proberbly already be aware that the first service pack for MS Vista is looming. Although the final version won't be available on MS update until proberbly next month - it is available as a download (roughly about 450Mb) direct from MS.

I decided to go all out and install it on my laptop earlier on, and during the setup it asked me to make sure that I had at least 7.5Gb of free space for the service pack. (Not exactly sure why it requested so much?) The install was pretty much painless although it did take a while and obviously restarted numerous times.

My system seemed to boot a bit quicker after the install, although I've noticed it does slow to a crawl frequently now. I tried to update my Vista experience score just before writing this; and the screen is still loading - something I never had trouble with before.

Although it was only released this week it has been available to manufacturers since early February. As mentioned above; it asked me to check that I had 7.5Gb of free space for the install - so was a little surprised to find that instead of me having less space (as you would typically expect when installing a service pack) I had 3Gb more?!?

Not quite sure why yet; but no doubt someone is bound to know. I'm just hoping that some bright spark at MS has solved the Vista memory leak - didn't have to be a plumber to see that leak! Even though it had just rebooted and I had very little running; the CPU-meter gadget was showing my memory as 60% used!

Looks like they decided to sort out more important things instead - good old Bill's retirement fund for example! Although it's using a lot of memory still - the processor seems to have been given a break; considering that the machine I'm currently using isn't dual-core it's currently below 4% - which in my mind is pretty good.

Still wondering what SP1 actually did though? When it took so long to release it! - Was it hand-coded by children in back-street sweatshops or something? (Actually that's not fair, they proberbly would have done a better job of fixing any of the numerous flaws - and that's coming from a Vista fan!)

Overall; Yes go forth and update if you wish! Just don't expect any wonderful fixes or amazing improvements. Unless you need 3Gb of extra space then I guess it's worth spend 1/4 hr to download it.

Dazza