I got brave and installed that latest tech refresh Release Candidate of Vista PS1 (Which turns out to be final btw) and have to say that so far so good, Vista feels much more responsive.

It should be publicly available in a little while.

Could this mean no more firefox crashes and random video freezes? or is the file i/o still boned?

My firefox hardly ever crashes tbh.

But File IO does seem much better.

Dont you mean SP1?, and which version 32 or 64 bit?,is it out march for the general public ?

I have a Gig E LAN at home & the IO performance of Vista is shocking . Mani what kind of speeds are you seeing when moving files from one network drive to another . I see about 5Mbs read & about 14Mbs write & a sustained write 25Mbs to one of external drives over USB2.

Never actually measured it as I only transfer from Vista to OSX (Tiger) and it's absolutely fine. Doesn't seem to mater whether the PC or the Mac initiates the transfer either.

List of programmes that may have issue working with new SP1 for Vista.
The only one i notice is Zone Alarm Security Suite

Apparently March for a release and April for autoupdate?

I may be wrong...

You can get it now if you really want to, I'm running it, I'd suggest waiting though.

yeah I tried it about a month ago. It was pretty sweet apart from me not being able to bring up the nvidia control panel

With SLi it's a must, so I had to roll back.

as some of u know i got a new pc and was having problems with it, ingame i would get black screen and crash at random times, sometimes i got a pink screen lol anyways after 2 weeks of the problem i installed xp and never once had the problem in xp, turns out it was vista or driectx10, think sp1 would beable 2 fix my problem?

Not had a serious problem with Vista really, but then this is mostly a work machine and the extra stability and frilly bits do grow on you after a while.

Slow copy/move file performance is still my biggest annoyance but it is a big one. I have a nasty feeling it's all DRM related.

my 2 peneth...

Ive had NO problems at all with SP1 and ive been running ti for 2 months now.
Ive read countless horror stories about this and that firewall dying a sad death and how certain machines die with it installed but I think these are highly reported but extremely rare problems mostly due to poor 3rd party software. my beta of kapersky 8.0 wont run at all e.g. but its a beta and the final version will have this sorted.
id say just get it and the chances of you haveing problems are very slight.
I run 250 PC's with vista of various specs and manufacturers and have no problems at all with vista business and home.
just get it you can always roll back in 5 minutes.

mani do you have write speed problems with sp1? that was the main fix in it i thought.

Not really, but it's not much if any faster than retail.