After much wait, Microsoft has finally released Windows Vista Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It’s a single large update since the release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1. The aim of this update is to provide support for new and emerging hardware, and to provide all the updates since the release of Service Pack 1.
Windows Vista SP2 is available as a standalone installer for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions and can be downloaded and installed directly. However, Service Pack 1 is a pre-requisite for installing this update.
This update will provide support for Blue Ray players, Bluetooth 2.1, some improvements in Windows Search and updated Wi-Fi configuration. The basic aim is to provide security updates and patches and protection against new threats.
Microsoft however warns that if you have installed programs such as ‘vLite’ to customize Windows Vista, you may have to delete such softwares before applying Service Pack 2.
This new Update will also be available through Windows Update.
To download Windows Vista Service Pack 2, Click Here
To download Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Click Here
Your computer while running most of the common applications usually don’t end up blocking on available processor due to multi -core technology. But that’s not the case when there is some kind of I/O operation involved related to Hard-Drive or USB. If you are using an application that needs to read/write a lot of files, it is not typical for your CPU processor utilization to be really low, since the application might be spending most of its time just waiting for the disk operations to complete.
Windows Vista helps you to increase your storage derives speed as you need, so you can customize your storage drives for running heavy applications by following these steps.
1) Open Device Manager: Right Click MyComputer then go to Properties>> Device Manager
2) Open Derive Properties: Expand the Disk Drive tab and right click the drive you want to customize then go to properties.
3) Last Step is to go to policies tab and Enable Write caching on the disk and advanced performance. And don’t forget to hit OK.
And you are done.
For USB/External Drives double click it to open up the properties screen. Then just change the setting to “Optimize for performance” and hit OK to continue.
Write caching was not enabled as removing devices directly without using the “Safely remove removable device”may lose your data. But enabling this option speeds up performance significantly when writing to the disk.
You have to restart your system and next time you will experience better disk writing and bootup performance.
