Windows Vista & Office 2007 SP2 April 29, 2009

Hey guys,

It seems that with the huge development on Windows 7, Microsoft hasn’t forgotten the much criticized predecessor Windows Vista.

With that said we come to the topic of the title, the second service pack for both Windows Vista and Office 2007.

It seems as though Microsoft has many hotfixes for us this time and the service pack for SP2 is pretty large indicating many changes. I have installed it personally on my Windows 7 machine and I guess there is a somewhat increase in performance. I have yet to try SP2 for Vista so I have no viewpoint on that.

Either way I strongly suggest that if you have either or both of these software packages, you should definitely upgrade by installing the second service packs.

Vista SP2 has been released to MSDN and Technet Subscribers and should be out very soon for public use.

The office SP2 update has already been released and is available via Windows update or the following link:

Office 2007 Sp2 Download

Enjoy!

Vista RTM & SP1 put to the Office Test February 27, 2008

Adrian Kingsley-hughes of ZDNet blogged a benchmarking test of bothe Vista RTM and SP1 when trying to run various tasks in Office 2007 Professional using scripts [from OfficeBench].

He used a pretty good computer with high specs:
 - Phenom 9700, Radeon 3850 graphics card, 2GB of RAM
which shows that the machine is not incapable of running Vista or Office.

The results are as follows:

	Time to execute test scripts (sec) -No load	Time to execute test scripts (sec) -Load
Vista RTM	265.83	271.06
Vista SP1	273.76	273.97

It seems as though SP1 has brought quite a significant slow down when using Office with no-load as there is an 8 second delay, but Adrian assures us that this will not affect the everyday user of Office. We also see that SP1 remians fairly consistent as it takes roughly 273 secs both times which isnt a bad thing.

So, for those of you who were scared SP1 may slow down your Office running times, dont worry and for those of you who had hoped for a better performance, tough luck.

N.B. In the second set of results for both RTM and SP1, the ‘load’ was just a small video running in the background by the script.