Microsoft issues emergency fixes for Vista

MICROSOFT HAS ISSUED two updates for Vista, rated 'important', that address performance and reliability problems. The updates have a combined size of 5.7Mb and both require a system restart. They have yet to be made available through Windows Update. Both 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista are affected.

The fixes have been floating around in beta guise for a few weeks, but fall well short of being the rumoured Vista SP1 discussed on the sort of forums that discuss such things. Downloading and installing the patches is quick and easy apart from the annoyance of two restarts. No noticeable performance or reliability improvements are immediately apparent on the two machines we tried it on (2 Gig 2.7GHz Core 2 Duo and 768MB 2.4GHz P4), but they were already pretty fast and reliable anyway.

Performance problems have cropped up with screen savers, network printers, corrupt AVI files, slow response times and corrupted RAW files with some Canon cameras. More serious problems addressed by the patch include corruption of offline files and machines forgetting their default gateway addresses. Memory management has also been improved, says the company.

Reliability improvements cover display drivers, PPP network connections and unexpected restarts.

More details here and here. µ