Vsp1cln.exe - Vista SP1 File Removal Tool

I've been running Vista SP1 for the past few days, and the system is quite stable. It was time to make Vista SP1 permanent on this machine. I had 45.6 GB free before running the above tool. Vsp1cln.exe is described as:

Vsp1cln.exe is an optional tool that you can run after you install SP1. This tool removes older versions of components that have been updated in SP1, which are stored during the installation in case you need to uninstall SP1 later. Saving these older components increases the amount of disk space that is used. Typically, you should run Vsp1cln.exe if you want to reclaim this disk space after applying SP1 and if you will not need to uninstall SP1. Note, however, that you cannot uninstall SP1 after you run this tool.

UAC asks for permission when running the tool, and a command prompt pops up asking if you want to make SP1 permanent. After the tool had run on my machine, disk space went from 45.6 GB to 47.3 GB. If you're sure you are going to be keeping SP1 this might be a worth while tool to run.

Vista slowness...

Vista slow? Says who?

Yesterday I made a post that said Vista seemed slow to me. I removed it five minutes after posting, because it just didn't seem right. I've had Vista Business running on a test machine that I've used every day for the past month or so. I've never had a problem in terms of speed. But when I installed Vista premium on my personal machine it seemed slow.

After clicking through to the post of Carl Campos from the above blog I read this:

As I write this, my 2 GB system...

And things seemed to click. The test system had 2 GB of Ram, my personal system has 1GB. Further, I have different antivirus suites (both symantec, but one corporate, and the other personal). I think these two aspects might be the difference.

daily usage problems with vista...

I use an old version (1.5) of utorrent with Vista. Downloading a video torrent in vista suddenly stops. I'm using the older version as I like it for its small size (200kb or so), and I read somewhere that some tracking bits were added to the newer versions (I can't confirm this right now). For some reason it seems that vista wants to create a thumbnail for the video, and this causes utorrent to stop downloading because another process is accessing the file.

Another problem I've noticed is that when I access a directory with a lot of media files, it takes a long time for the explorer to make thumbnails for the video, and the whole system seems to slow down. Further, if you want to delete items in the directory, updating the windows is slow, as its still trying to identify media files, create thumbnails and what not. This is really irritating.

In fact, their have been two occassions where explorer stopped responding and the system restarted explorer. This may also have to do with the codecs for the media files causing explorer problems.

how hard is it to "press n"?

with Vista speech recognition!

Find out here.

Vista Upgrade

I have an XP installation that I thought I'd try to upgrade. All versions of Vista are on the same DVD. I had previously installed Ultimate, and I thought I'd try premium to see the differences first hand. Turns out you can't upgrade XP to Premium from the DVD I had. You could only do a clean install. You could upgrade to Business, Ultimate and I think Enterprise. I restarted the install this time putting in the key for business. The installer has the option of going online to see if their are any updates to the installer. This is new. Turns out I had to uninstall the Bluetooth Stack for Windows by Toshiba. I'm going to restart the installation now.

Its upgrading right now, and the installation dialog says at the bottom:
"Your upgrade may take several hours to complete"!

Thankfully it didn't take several hours, just one, and the install was pretty normal after that.

extending vista trial time

Now this is certainly interesting:

What may be news to you, however, is that you can easily extend the 30-day Windows Vista grace period to 120 days. No hacks required. This is an official, supported operation directly from Microsoft.

With the amount of testing I do, I'd say this was a good enough period for a test, wiping out the drive, and reinstalling and testing again. I think the version of Vista downloaded from MSDN has something like 10 activiations, and I must have already done at least five if not more. This should help a lot.

Vista Experience

I'm beginning to get a little disappointed with Vista. It was working quite well for me the past few days, but I've been having application issues as days go by. First vlc-0.8.6 wouldn't play properly, it gives me a black screen instead of video. Switching back to 0.8.5 works, but then it disables aero. Then I had the problems with IE7 crashing yesterday. And today while doing video chat on Skype, I got a bluescreen, and the system rebooted. Now all of this could be a result of third party software, but thats my point. If an application misbehaves, the OS shouldn't crash.

While transferring data via scp, my wireless connection died. All other machines worked without any problems. I had to plug in a network cable.

World of Warcraft keeps crashing on me, a few minutes after I'd start it up.

Plus, a 40 gig harddrive is no where near a decent amount of disk space for Vista. Granted I have quite a bit installed (Office 2007, Visual Studio 2007, world of warcraft, warcraft3 being the heavy hitters) I still should have had more than a gig left at least!

Oh well, I guess the honey moon with Vista is over, and all the little problems are cropping up now! :)