Early on, we showed you completely non-scientific evidence of Win 7's pleasingly fast boot time. (Shutting down is another matter—my build (6801) sometimes takes forever.) I was glad that Kingsley-Hughes—using a Phenom 9700 quad-core system with ATI Radeon 3850, 2GB of Corsair Dominator RAM and WD's 10K RPM Raptor as primary drive—managed to demonstrate that the fast boot isn't a fluke. By the way, Vista SP1 had the slowest boot.

In two other tests, PassMark Performance and PCMark Vantage, Win 7 pre-beta beat the Vista builds, though it failed to trounce them in the CineBench R10 test.

Remember, this is a pre-beta, so nothing is guaranteed, but what makes this newsworthy is that Kingsley-Hughes—who incidentally is in no way a Bond villain—ran similar tests with Vista a few years back, and early Win 7 makes a mockery of that noise. Check the ZDNet article for the full system specs and benchmark scores—I'm sure at least some of you will want the nitty gritty. [ZDnet via Lifehacker]

I'm runnin a stock Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 with 4GB of RAM. I counted 108 apps total and gave up bored after I had running anything from Photoshop, Visual studio 2008, Office professional 2007, Safari, and Media Center all the way down to that rescource hog, Minesweeper.

This fascinates me at oh-so-many levels:

• How the heck do you have 100 graphics applications installed in your computer in the first place?
• Why do people still care about this kind of things?
• What do you people really care about when it comes to the performance of your computer?
• How comes we haven't had any Linux user telling us he's running 250,000 apps simultaneously on six different monitors.
• How many applications can the Beamz run?
• And finally, how many graphical apps can you run in your computer without it burning down in flames?

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines. Please write your opinions and personal benchmarks in the comments.

SP1 doesn't resolve some of the most annoying flaws in Vista, including slow start-ups and reboots, and a security system that nags you too much and requires add-on anti-virus software. I guess these problems will either never be fixed fully or will have to wait for SP2.

It not only basically calls Microsoft inept, each bit is an unspoken comparison to OS X. SP1 has, however, gotten better than its RC, which we tested a couple months ago. Whereas it took 30 percent longer to transfer files over the network than regular Vista in our test, Moss says transfers took half as long. Recovery time is better from sleep and hibernation, and rebooting is about the same, once it relearns your most frequent programs—a point I think Mossberg unnecessarily belabored, to my horror.

His overall verdict though is what I think is slightly weird: "On balance, the update is probably worth installing, especially since Microsoft will deliver it automatically. But I wouldn't rush to grab it and I wouldn't expect much from it."

It's fine to be disappointed (I was when I installed the RC1), and most of his criticisms are valid, even if you can see glimmers of 10.5.2 comparisons between the lines. But it's a service pack. A mild recommendation makes little sense (vs. a do-not-install warning, which could be perfectly warranted). You've pretty much gotta install it at some point. [All Things D]

This means better stability, faster file handling and improved device compatibility. It also contains some future proofing, including support for DirectX 10.1, UEFI firmware and ExFAT flash-memory file format. On the subject of overall speed, some early Battlemodo action suggests that there's a nice bump here.

In terms of reliability, Microsoft tells us, "SP1 users likely to have fewer disruptions," defining a disruption as anything from a full-on system crash to the likelier application failure. Microsoft quantifies this with "average time between disruptions." Initially on Vista, you could go about 17 hours without a disruption, now it's double that at 34 hours between disruptions. When I asked about how this compared with XP, Microsoft said it was a tough comparison, since they lacked the detailed telemetry on XP. (Perhaps this is a convenient shortcoming.)

As you might have heard, Microsoft is also claiming that, security wise, Vista is not only better than XP but that it's better than Linux and Mac OSX as well, using security updates to 10.4 Tiger in the first year as a comparative example. [Microsoft]

The difference comes from the way Microsoft dumped the XP-style buffering for network transfers, which resulted in a mismatch between Vista and XP (and a slow file transfer). The upside is that you'll be over to fling files over your home network much faster if you have one of those fancy WHS machines. However, if you run applications that use the Multimedia Class Scheduler, like Windows Media Player, it'll still kill network performance even with the new boost. [ZDNet via Crunchgear]

The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard - such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently.

Consequently, your schmancy new DX10 card won't be so schmancy when 10.1 drops. On the bright side, even if this turns out the way the Inquirer seems to think it will, since DX10.1 supposedly isn't shipping until Vista SP 1 does, you probably have about 26 years of being on the cutting edge with a standard whose game support is nascent, to put it generously. [The Inquirer via /., Image via Flickr]