Hi Friends:
I know that I have been advising those who don't like adventures in software to stay away from SP1 for a while--while checking to see how the pros, semipros, and masochists fare (I won't reveal my class
). Regardless, I downloaded, from Technet, and installed SP1 RTM.
The installation took about 1 hour and 5 minutes from click to finish. All was very smooth. After installing, the first thing I dealt with was my low screen resolution. I set it to highest level in the control panel, and it looked good even though I could see that my NVIDIA card had not installed. After fixing the resolution, I put all my misplaced icons where I like them. I then went to device manger to see what all had not installed.
The only things that appeared not to be installed properly were my NVIDIA card, as mentioned, and my Realtek HD Audio. I simply reinstalled the drivers for these devices from device manager, and all was well.
I was glad that my Synaptics touchpad had installed properly because, with major changes, I usually have to reinstall its driver. But, oops, I spoke too soon. I noticed that the Synaptics animation was not in my taskbar when I found that I needed to set some of my touchpad settings. So, I went to investigate. Somehow, in fiddling around, I found that a trial version of the software was installed--or at least that is what Vista told me. Go figure. So, I could not set the settings I wanted to set.
It took me a while to sort things enough for now. I presumably uninstalled the trial version of Synaptics, went to HP, and got the right driver for my lappy. I installed the driver, but the touchpad would not work. After hooking up a mouse, device manager told me there was a registry problem. I found that the old trial version of Synaptics had not uninstalled completely. I used YourUninstaller to completely uninstall all pieces of Synaptics anything. Then, I restarted. For now, the Vista generic touchpad driver is getting me through the night. I will investigate more thoroughly tomorrow and finish my sorting process. It really should not be a problem getting the touchpad back into proper form. Maybe this problem is the reason that Windows update keeps pushing the Synaptics touchpad driver at us.
We'll see.
I have not had time to experience much of SP1, but, when I have obervations, I will update this thread. I did not do any benchmarks, but I will be able to tell if things are significantly different. You can rely on me not to overstate the merits, including speed, of SP1. I will have to be really impressed to give high praise. But, I'd be really impressed if SP1 didn't break significant things that used to work well.