Despite having some misgivings, I went ahead and installed Vista SP1 on my laptop (after making the appropriate funeral arrangements and updating my will). As a Microsoft Partner, I have access to the download ahead of the general public. It surprised me that Microsoft did not originally plan to make it available to developers and partners early, so they could test it. But I suppose enough people complained bitterly that they caved in and gave us access.
Anyway.
I went into it with several expectations:
1. That it might do something horrible and irreversible to the operating system, based on shoddy drivers or a third party program.
2. That it might resolve the unrelenting lag experienced when opening My Computer or a network share
3. That it might resolve the most annoying of all my Vista-related problems, which is that the laptop hangs when coming out of standby and must be hard-booted.
4. That it might add some interesting functionality to the OS.
I was wrong on all but one of these assumptions. It did not kill my computer. It has not noticeably improved performance (although I am still evaluating this). And the OS seems to behave exactly as it did before. The only new thing I've seen so far is that the RDP client has some extra information. All of which, I guess, you'd expect from an service pack. You don't want sweeping changes, you just want added stability.
And stability I got. I am still testing this, but it looks like the standby-lockup issue has gone away.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw my test-case out there. My laptop is loaded with specialized software, 64-bit drivers, and connects to numerous networks. It went off without a hitch.
The one thing I didn't like about it was that it took over 2 hours to finish (not counting the time it took to download). I have dual Turion processors and 4GB of RAM. You'd think it would be a little snappier. I can only imagine how long it will take on a less-powerful machine.
The installation rebooted the computer several times. After the first reboot it did not come all the way back to the login prompt. It remained in the “pre-installation environment” where it displayed such helpful messages as “Service Pack Part 1 of 3 installing. Do not turn off your computer”. At one point a command window appeared and displayed status as it copied 12,000 files and updated registry keys.
The event logs are full of lots of new entries, none of which look exactly comforting, but don't appear to be errors either.
So far, this seems like a safe upgrade.
moffitar