SP1

Windows Vista SP1 has finally touched down and is officially available for download. It will be pushing mediocre broadband connections to the absolute limit as it is a heavy beast. There is a swathe of security updates and hotfixes in the mix which ways in at 434.5MB for the 32Bit version 726.5MB for the 64-bit version. Those that are unlucky enough to live in countries with bandwidth restrictions are likely to feel a bit of a sting.

The big question on the minds of many people is will this thing work with a cracked version of Windows Vista? There is some bad news there, I am afraid. If you made use of the popular Paradox crack then your product will be deactivated. Word on the street is that you won't be forced into reduced access mode, you will still be able to run your system, albeit with annoying pop-ups that you will need to work around (rumor has it there is a workaround for this). If you are using Vista Loader, it does appear that your system will still work, for the time being at least. Vista Loader is the only major crack that escaped the net. Just do a file search on your primary hard disk for: "Vista Loader" in order to find out if you should download Vista SP1.

If you are running a legitimate system then this should be good news. We are expecting to see a performance boost and better multi-core support. If you are running a quad-core processor, my guess is that now it will start to show its real benefits. There are said to be some major improvements with this release, let's hope so. I like Vista, but it does have a ways to go before it is a complete operating system.

If you are a Crysis player running GeForce then grab the latest drivers, they are currently in Beta. The older drivers are geared towards the original Vista and according to Extreme Tech, will actually cause a performance decrease at higher graphics settings. The new drivers will give you a slight increase, but nothing to write home about.

Source: Slashgear, Extreme Tech