Windows Vista SP1 was posted to the MSDN subscribers site late last week. I downloaded it and while it was downloading took a full system backup of my Windows Vista Ultimate based Dell D820 laptop.
It just finished installing. Took about an hour and is broken up into 3 parts with a reboot requrired after each part. The update went smoothly and so far everything seems to be running fine. I did notice one thing that I also noticed after taking windows updates this week. My Dell mouse software's icon was back in the tray even though I normally had it removed. I also had to re-enable clicking the wheel to function as a middle mouse button. A collegue of mine who reverses his mouse buttons noticed that he had to re-reverse them after last weeks updates, I imagine he'll have to do the same thing after installing SP1.
I had no issues with drivers on my D820 after install. I did notice that it ate over 2 gigs of harddisk space. I imagine there are probably files that it left behind that I can delete, I just have to track them down and find them to free up some of this space. After running I re-ran the Windows Experience Index tool and nothing changed. FWIW my D820 scores Processor:5.1, Memory: 4.7, Graphics: 3.6, Gaming Graphics: 3.2, and Primary Hard drive: 5.1.
I did notice that one of my pet peeves from Vista seems to working better. Navigating to a location in Windows explorer would often hang things up. The right side that showed your directory would immediately appear but the explorer window would hang up while it generated the left side folder structure tree. So far this has not happened since installing SP1, although it was a intermittant problem that may rear its head.
I'll update this blog posting with what I find over the next few days/weeks, especially regarding its impact on development. Feel free to drop your own comments on your experience with SP1.