http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,138041-page,1/article.html#
Microsoft Updates Vista's Speed, Stability, Again
For the second time in two months, Microsoft rolls out fixes to improve Windows Vista's speed
and reliability.
For the second time in two months, Microsoft Corp. has rolled out fixes to improve Windows
Vista's speed and reliability.
The four separate updates, available now for download from the vendor's Web site, address
several operating system performance and stability problems, deal with a dozen Universal Serial
Bus issues, improve Windows Media Player and patch Media Center.
Although Microsoft has put Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) in the hands of some testers, it
has said it will continue to update the original Vista -- dubbed "RTM" for "release to
manufacturing" -- even as it puts SP1 through its paces. Seven weeks ago, it issued a pair of
updates that tackled numerous problems, offering them as optional items through Windows Update
last month.
"[Tuesday's] updates are a collection of fixes that we have made to address a small set of
reliability, compatibility, stability, security and performance issues," a Microsoft
spokeswoman said Wednesday in an e-mail reply to questions. "[They] will provide incremental
improvements to the most common issues -- but in general, these improvements or fixes are going
to be very narrow in scope."
The widest ranging of yesterday's quartet was a 5.4MB update for multiple hardware and
operating system issues that Microsoft said extends laptop battery life, improves the stability
of wireless network connections and deals with compatibility problems with some antivirus software.
Interestingly, the update also promised to shorten Vista start-up and resume-from-sleep times,
problems that Microsoft had supposedly fixed with the August patches. Vista users have
complained about Vista's slow start-up, shutdown and return from power-saving modes since at
least April.
A second update, detailed in the KB941600 support document, is a cumulative roll-up of 12 fixes
to Vista's USB components. In Microsoft's terminology, a "roll-up" is a collection of patches,
similar to a service pack, but not tested as extensively. A similar cumulative update for Media
Center is also available from the Microsoft download site; it deals with several specific
problems, including some involving how Vista interacts with Microsoft Xbox 360 video game consoles.
The fourth update patches Windows Media Player 11, the default audio- and video-playing
software included with the operating system. Microsoft offered few details -- a support
document has not been added to the database -- but the company's spokeswoman said that the
8.8MB download for the 32-bit version of Vista "eliminates corruption of Media Player database
in certain scenarios and of media stream in certain scenarios."
The updates will be distributed via Windows Update "in the near future," the spokeswoman added,
but as in August, she would not pin them to a date. Microsoft's next scheduled Windows Update
releases are due out next Tuesday.
Microsoft has aggressively promoted its ability to update Vista through Windows Update, even
going so far as denying after Vista's launch that it needed to produce a comprehensive service
pack, or SP1. It has continued to claim that most issues can be addressed by Windows Update.
Mike Nash, the Microsoft executive who leads Windows product management, was the latest to brag
about Windows Update's prowess in keeping Vista running smoothly. "The really important updates
we can release with Windows Update, and the need for a service pack is actually reduced," he said.
* MICHAEL:
