On Tuesday August 7th, Microsoft released a couple of patches for Windows Vista. One deals with Vista performance and the other deals with Reliability and compatibility. These patches are available for download as standalone patches and I am not sure if they will show up next week under the scheduled patch Tuesday downloads in Microsoft Update. I have applied both patches to two of my Windows Vista systems so far. I noticed very little difference on my Vista Ultimate Asus laptop with 2 GB of Ram after applying the patch. I did notice however a huge difference on my Intel Core 2 Duo desktop machine that has 4 GB of ram. As I had posted earlier the upgrade from 2 to 4 GB of RAM on that machine was not as smooth as I would have liked. After the upgrade the machine seemed like it would pause from time to time, It never displayed this with only 2 GB of RAM and would only occur for a few seconds. Various combinations of RAM sticks would make it worse or better. In the end, I found that 4 double sided RAM sticks ran better but the machine would still occasionally pause for up to a minute.
Since the performance patch directly indicated that it addressed memory management I applied that as soon as I got it last night. I have been using the machine (albeit via remote desktop) all day and there definitely seems to be an improvement in it’s performance and have not seen it hang all day. I have not tried it enough after the compatibility and reliability patch all that much to see whether there has been a difference.
Here are links to the Microsoft KB articles regarding the contents of the patches, and these articles contain links to the download site. Please note that you have to validate your copy of Vista as genuine.
Performance Patch KB Link
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938979/en-us
Reliability and Compatibility KB link
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938194/en-us
I would suggest that anyone running Vista may benefit by installing these two patches
Stephen
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