Microsoft has been supplying beta testers with two "special patches" for Windows Vista which are designed to improve the performance and compatibility of the operating system. The two patches, distributed through Connect to a select group of testers have been leaked and are now all over the internet. So what do the patches do?
The
Vista Performance and Reliability Pack improves some things that hurt the performance of systems running Vista, including file copying, corrupted AVI files, Canon RAW files, memory corruption, and more.
The
Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack fixes some common compatibility issues that could hurt your system, including external displays on laptops, video drivers, HD DVD and Blu-Ray playback, printer drivers, and more.
It is not recomended that you install these on a
production machine because they are still designated as beta, however, if anyone is able to use them on a test rig we'd be interested to hear the outcome. There appears to be one error that some users are experiencing; After installation they are unable to copy, move and rename directories. "Directory does not exist" is the error received". A number of users report having to roll back their systems because of this.
64 bit users please note: These hotfixes break all current methods of bypassing driver signing requirements except the good old F8 during boot (that you have to do every single time you start vista). IF you are using Rivatuner, atitool and or Peerguardian on 64bit vista, you will have to use F8 every single time to disable driver signing requirements to use those two programs - the x86 version is unaffected.
There's no need to take risks and rush things as these hotfixes should be officially released on the patch update next Tuesday (U.S. time).
938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:
Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.
938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:
Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.
I decided to remove the links to these downloads to be consistent with my own rules
- but if you want them they're not hard to find.
