I love it when big companies make videos to poke fun at themselves. This is one of those moments.

As some of you may (or may not) know, I run Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. It runs great for what I want, and it has a lot of nice features that you don’t see in XP. Recently, Microsoft released the installers for vista sp1. Last night, I was bored, so I installed SP1. The install went smoothly, completing in under 2 hours. However, after I rebooted my computer, something was absent. The sound! I was too tired to deal with it last night, so after I woke up this morning, I did a quick google search. It returned a link to the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

I had already tried to restart my computer (Several times), to no avail. So I followed the second step (unplug your speakers, and then plug em back in). Bang! The audio software popped up asking me what the jack I had plugged in did (I have 5.1 audio). YAY! My audio works again!

As for other things I’ve noticed in SP1, I’ve found a few in my few hours of use.

First, The reboot time of my computer has been cut in half. It was somewhere around 4 minutes before the upgrade, and now its down to 2.

Second, the general OS itself feels a bit snappier. Prompts come up quicker and Firefox and iTunes both load faster (amazingly), among other things.

Finally, I’ve noticed that my custom UXTheme was disabled after installation. You can repatch it again, but I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet. This was kind of a disappointment.

Overall, I greatly enjoy the upgrade to Vista SP1. This upgrade has made my decision final: I will never go back to Windows XP.