Microsoft Releases Compatibility & Reliability Packs for Vista

Does this mean the OS will work now?

Wednesday, August 8, 2007 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News

While Service Pack 1 looms somewhere in the far-off distance, Microsoft is keeping busy with patches and fixes for Windows Vista.  Today, they officially announced the availability of what many consider to be the first stages of what will eventually be SP1; the "performance and reliability" and "compatibility and reliability" patches.  They currently don't show up as an option in Windows Update and have to be downloaded manually, but that is likely to change come the next Patch Tuesday, August 14th.

Here are a few of the major fixes introduced by these patches:

  • Explorer file transfer (copy/move) speed improved.
  • Improves memory management performance.
  • Offline file synchronization fixed.
  • Numerous game hardware-related incompatibilities corrected.

Each patch may be downloaded separately from the Microsoft support site, but requires that you validate your installation of Vista before receiving the file.  While these are no longer beta patches, you should probably keep an eye to your favorite tech forums to see how others are getting along with the fixes before applying them yourself.

Download: Performance & Reliability (KB938979)
Download: Compatibility & Reliability (KB938194)

21 Reply 43 Referrals
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thomassen
Reply #1 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 10:34 AM
Installed! I'm gonna try to copy 30-40 GB later on once my backupi machine is set up.

bilbo1930
Reply #2 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 10:45 AM
im too..
copy faster..

starkers
Reply #3 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 12:02 PM
Oi, Zoomba, wots this 'ere in the subtitle, then: "Does this mean the OS will work now?"

I'll 'ave yer know that I've bin running Vista fer 8 month now and 'aven't noticed it NOT working....'cepts when I turns it off.

Oh, and thanks for the heads up on this release....a mate who trials/beta tests for MS says these patches do improve functionality and reliability, so I'll give them a try based on his experience.

Orion
Reply #4 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 1:28 PM
"Does this mean the OS will work now?"

Strange...Zoomba never struck me as being ignorant before?

Zoomba
Reply #5 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 1:36 PM
I use the subtitle on news posts for snarky comments

thomassen
Reply #6 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 2:04 PM
I'm copying larger amount of data now from my main comp to my secondary comp, both running vista with these patches. seem to work pretty good so far.

WeatherBound
Reply #7 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 2:41 PM
Thanks Zoomba

Did fix my camera program.

starkers
Reply #8 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 3:41 PM
I use the subtitle on news posts for snarky comments


Yep, we can often use the additional amusement/humor.

BTW, I've installed both patches and just for a test I copied the entire contents of my music folder (35gb) using Vista over to XP on my dual boot and it was noticably quicker and did not show such inaccurate time remaining, etc. Took a bit over 1 hour 20 and didn't seem to drag/overly draw on the CPU as before.

Haven't noticed any other improvements as yet (been busy doing other stuff) but I shall report any I happen to notice.

Surj
Reply #9 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 11:27 PM
installed them, and my system is actually still running....surprising given the amount of hardware issues i've had on a system that meets "vista ready" standards. heck, "games for windows" are giving me problems, namely Company of Heroes, which ran fine on XP. maybe the patch will help with that *cough* kind of had this coming I guess, but one would think vista ready and games for windows stickers would give you some level of comfort

someone31988
Reply #10 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 11:28 PM
I've got both patches installed now on my laptop running Vista Ultimate 32-bit edition. I haven't done anything to really test them out, but things do somehow seem a little faster overall. It could just a placebo effect there, though.

xDeVsFaN1830x
Reply #11 Wednesday, August 8, 2007 11:39 PM
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9757059-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

Is this guy a microsoft hater, or just REALLY impatient?

boss0190
Reply #12 Thursday, August 9, 2007 12:02 AM
Installed both. Nothing screwed up, but no improvements seen either yet.

Surj
Reply #13 Thursday, August 9, 2007 12:41 AM
these actually seemed to help, yet another minor miracle

MadMax008
Reply #14 Thursday, August 9, 2007 3:45 PM
Thanks for posting these! I installed them and wanted to report back with results. I've noticed significantly improved startup times, thats the biggest thing. I haven't done any large file transfers or anything, yet. Hopefully we'll see some more of these from MS.

starkers
Reply #15 Friday, August 10, 2007 6:56 AM
Dunno if the patches were the cause or not, but after installing them the dialog in the library, rip and burn pages, etc, wasn't showing in Windows Media Player. There may be another cause, but I un-installed the patches and the dialog returned....shall reinstall the patches later and will report back on the result.

BX
Reply #16 Friday, August 10, 2007 7:53 AM
Still gettting those "display driver has stopped responding" messeges!!!!

PhrozenMenace
Reply #17 Friday, August 10, 2007 12:02 PM
the perfomance one works but that compatibility one sucks..my media players..winamp..windows media, doesn't recognize files from my external

voyager2007
Reply #18 Saturday, August 11, 2007 4:41 AM
Screwed up my internet connection. I could not connect or anything so i had to do a system restore.

starkers
Reply #19 Saturday, August 11, 2007 10:06 AM
Dunno if the patches were the cause or not, but after installing them the dialog in the library, rip and burn pages, etc, wasn't showing in Windows Media Player. There may be another cause, but I un-installed the patches and the dialog returned....shall reinstall the patches later and will report back on the result


I reinstalled the Compatibility & Reliability patch (KB938194) and again lost the text in all Windows Media Player windows. I opened several other apps but it seems only to affect WMP. Furthermore, uninstalling the patch itself did not restore the text, even after I ran Ccleaner....a complete system restore was necessary before WMP was returned to normal.

Another strange thing, even though I installed the Performance patch previously, it would not install this time....after doing the update search it returned a "not compatible with your system" message.

XX
Reply #20 Tuesday, August 21, 2007 3:05 AM
I installed those two, and it kinda helped. It used to crash each time I opened file explorer due to domain share issues. Now? Well it pauses for good 10 seconds or more, but in least it won't crash.

File copy is a little better. 1 MB file in raid-5 system takes 2 seconds as opposed to full 15 seconds before.

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