Official update is available that improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista

Update KB 938194

According to MS KB Article 938194 this update resolves following issues on vista

• The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
932539 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932539/) The screen may go blank when you try to upgrade the video driver on a Windows Vista-based computer
• The computer stops responding, and you receive a "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered" error message. You can restart the computer only by pressing the computer's power button.
• The computer stops responding or restarts unexpectedly when you play video games or perform desktop operations.
• The Diagnostic Policy Service (DPS) stops responding when the computer is under heavy load or when very little memory is available. This problem prevents diagnostics from working.
• The screen goes blank after an external display device that is connected to the computer is turned off. For example, this problem may occur when a projector is turned off during a presentation.
• A computer that has NVIDIA G80 series graphic drivers installed stops responding.
• Visual appearance issues occur when you play graphics-intensive games.
• You experience poor playback quality when you play HD DVD disks or Blu-ray disks on a large monitor.
• Applications that load the Netcfgx.dll component exit unexpectedly.
• Windows Calendar exits unexpectedly after you create a new appointment, create a new task, and then restart the computer.
• Internet Connection Sharing stops responding after you upgrade a computer that is running Microsoft Windows XP to Windows Vista and then restart the computer.
• The Printer Spooler service stops unexpectedly.
• You receive a "Stop 0x0000009F" error when you put the computer to sleep while a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) connection is active. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
931671 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931671/) Error message when you put a Windows Vista-based computer to sleep while a PPP connection is active: "STOP 0x0000009F"

Download from here
Update for compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista KB 938194

Update KB 938979

According to MS KB Article 938979 this update resolves following issues on vista

• You experience a long delay when you try to exit the Photos screen saver.
• A memory leak occurs when you use the Windows Energy screen saver.
• If User Account Control is disabled on the computer, you cannot install a network printer successfully. This problem occurs if the network printer is hosted by a Windows XP-based or Windows Server 2003-based computer.
• When you write data to an AVI file by using the AVIStreamWrite function, the file header of the AVI file is corrupted.
• When you copy or move a large file, the "estimated time remaining" takes a long time to be calculated and displayed.
• After you resume the computer from hibernation, it takes a long time to display the logon screen.
• When you synchronize an offline file to a server, the offline file is corrupted.
• If you edit an image file that uses the RAW image format, data loss occurs in the image file. This problem occurs if the RAW image is from any of the following digital SLR camera models:
• Canon EOS 1D
• Canon EOS 1DS
• After you resume the computer from hibernation, the computer loses its default gateway address.
• Poor memory management performance occurs.

improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista KB 938979

 

Awesome..I guess these are the same updates that were in beta form last week? Windows update didn't recognize that these updates were available yet, so I had to download them straight from the site...is that normal?

 

Made things a bit better for me How come there not included in the windows update?

 

They were leaked I guess microsoft was just like what the hell lets make ours official.

Edit: Downloaded and installed hopefully fixes some of the crashing I have been experiencing.

 

no issues before and no noticeable changes after. Lets see what happensx

 

Microsoft don't want to give this kind of updates to pirates. This update improves the compatibility and reliability of vista & it's very valuable vista update.To prevent pirated copy owners getting this, they request users to validate their copy to download this update

 

Thanks for the heads up. I'm particularly excited about fixing
" -Poor memory management performance occurs."

Vista was using around 40% of my 2GB of RAM at bootup. After installing the patch, that's down to about 30%. Sometimes as I'm playing games (particularly Battlefield 2142, which is infamous for being a RAM hog), my RAM usage got up to 95% one time. I know Vista likes to keep the RAM full to speed things up (Superfetch), but seriously, you gotta know when to let go...

I'm also excited about the sleep/hibernate improvement - I've been having some troubles with that (my laptop wouldn't come out of sleep and just sit at a black screen), so hopefully this will fix it. I'm also glad to see the fix for the (sometimes) exceedingly long file transfers.

Here's an article about it from Ars Technica. Looks like it will be "official" on Windows Update sometime next week.

Man, if these patches deliver on their promises, I will be one happy camper.

 

This patch seems to make a big difference in my RAM usage as well.

 

What's Windows Vista x86?
That the same thing as 32bit?

 

Yes x86 means 32bit

 

Yup, that's right.

Jeebus christ this patch rocks hard. Not only is my desktop RAM usage way down, my RAM usage while gaming is now much lower too. Huzzah!

 

Vista's Superfetch uses free memory to cache programs and stuff, which is a good thing. Free memory sitting there doesn't do anything, but using it to speed up application launches (see Tomshardware benchmarks) is better use of that memory.

Heres a good quote from Gentoo Linux:

Bottom line, you can disable superfetch if you want and you'll probably see more free RAM, but why would you bother? The "cache" can quickly be dropped and the memory used by applications when needed.

 

Superfetch and vista isn't dumb. Sometimes when I am ideling and listening to music and browsing my ram will be 40 percent. Then when I turn that stuff off like 31 percent. THen I play a game and soon as i leave the game my ram usage was 20 percent. 11 percent drop vista did by freeing up ram in unnecessary stuff. Point being leave superfetch alone it knows whats it doing.

The patch made some issues of my games go away with crashing somewhat. Also performance did go up a bit. before fear combat 1280 x 1024 max settings, the game would stutter when there was a bunch of explosions and people and now it shows no noticeable framerate drop. And no the before slowdown was not because of lag.

 

'Fraid the patches didn't help me. RAM usage, if anything, has gone up (though it was 600 MB before, fairly low by Vista standards), and it didn't solve my most important compatibility issue. Nice find though, thought it might be what I was looking for. Oh well, maybe it'll be the next update.

 

3DMar06 Score same as before the update..BTW task bar show my ram usage go down 40% to 30%....File copying between to partitions are quite fast.

 

Are these updates going to be in the patch tuesday bunch? I'd rather hold off than installing something thats not quite ready.

 

These are released from Microsoft officially to general vista consumers.This is not a previous beta hotfix

 

I've got to note the dissonance between people gleefully reporting a decrease in their RAM in this thread, and people in other threads insisting those who complain about high RAM use in Vista are stupid, unwashed troglodytes who don't understand Superfetch and aren't fit to use Vista.

I at least hope these aren't the same people. Because some folks in camp 2 get pretty nasty when responding to people who've asked in the past why their Vista memory was so high. It seems even Microsoft realized the memory usage wasn't supposed to be that high - that it wasn't a feature, but an error, and are attempting to fix it. Now if only the fanboys would take note.

 

What the heck are you trying to say?
Somehow you seem to contradict yourself in your statement.

And yes, I am a windows fanboy, but my first computer was a Mac and I've used Mac OS longer than Windows

 

I personally love Superfetch, I was just saying that it just didn't seem to want to let go of RAM when it was needed elsewhere (i.e., when gaming).

I completely understand why Vista uses so much RAM (to make everything faster ), but now with this latest update they seem to have optimized it some.

 

It's a bit hypocritical to criticize others for asking why Vista uses so much memory, and turn around and cheer wildly when a patch is released that allows Vista to use less memory. The contradiction you're noticing is the precise contradiction I'm hoping isn't occurring in this thread.

I've read too many threads where the former occurred (you're stupid if you complain about Vista's ram use), and many of those people (the ones calling other people incompetent for questioning Vista's exorbitant memory requirements compared to XP) will undoubtedly profit from this patch. Sort of like the people who shout at other people for noting Firefox's heavy memory consumption, but are the first to download any patch that's said to reduce the footprint.

 

lol, makes perfect sense now.

 

Well, it's not entirely hypocritical. I've had situations where Battlefield 2142 is using "only" 1.3GB of RAM, but meanwhile Vista is still merrily eating up 700MB, and my RAM usage goes critical and everything starts stuttering. So I still appreciate Superfetch and all, but I am glad that Vista uses less memory now.

I do agree though that people shouldn't scoff at others for being concerned about Vista's RAM usage - it's a legitimate concern, since that leaves less room for other RAM-hungry programs like games or Photoshop or whatever.

 

Thanks for the heads up about these going official! Been waiting for them to be released for real.

 

Installed both and now my battery icon disappeared? How can I get it back?

 

Right click on task bar>Properties>Notification area>select power option on system icon menu

 

Theres always optimization. Not really hypocritical if something you said was good got even better. Its just like game patches and new drivers which makes the programs/hardware run better.

 

i'm not sure that the patch has reduced Vista's memory footprint at all, at least not from what i've noticed. that they fixed the file-transfer bug is more than enough for me, and resolved my biggest complaint/issue with the OS.

oh well. i'm more than happy with superfetch.

 

are these purely for vista 32bit ore are they for both vista 32/64??

 

separate patches for both 32 and 64 bit versions of Vista

 

cheers.

 

Thanks for posting them. Just installed.....................

 

I've read there might be a problem with the Vista 64 patches- that they are unable to install the patches. Can anyone with Vista 64 confirm they have installed the patches and are working in their system?

 

i thought there were 3 updates altogether for this "performance package" or whatever you want to call it.. or am i wrong?? thanks

 

Since these patches haven't made it into Windows Update yet, I'm not all that confident in installing them.
But, it looks like computers are working without incident after the install.

 

I have Vista x64 and it installed without problems. One thing I noticed is that the battery icon disappeared.

 

Hey thanks bigspin for the help, got the icon back. I wonder how that happened in the first place.

Just solved the problem with CNET TV video not running smoothly, just reloaded the Adobe flash player.

 

WOW!! what a difference!!! the system is MUCH more responsive now and my ram usage has dropped A LOT like 300-400mb overall when just sitting... great update...i had 0 issues with it installed perfectly..

 

What 300 MB Drop....

I never see any big differance ...600MB + with KIS(Kaspersky)

Maybe mine not installed correctly

 

I just installed the update and my ram used went down to 31% from 39%. Also my 3dmark 06 score went up from 3393 to 3580! Very happy with it so far.

 

So when exactly is this going to be available via Windows Update?

 

tuesday i believe

 

i installed them both for vista 64 and havent had a problem yet

speed seem a little nipper tho not much and memory used is slightly lower.

my power/battery icon never disappeared unlike the user that posted earlier, but it does seem okay and cant fault it.

only problem i had was playing the addon pack for fear last night
i have 4gb memory + 6gb page file +2gb memory card for ready boost and yet i got an out of memory box come up when the game crashed after 2 hours tho i can say i have been playing through fear and the addon all week and this is the first crash or fault ...all games iv played have worked flawlessly so cant see why people complain vista64 cant play games

 

Thanks for the update, I would have never known!

 

Many news sites have speculated it will be available via Windows Update on patch tuesday.

ie tgdaily:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33327/108/

 

Is there something wrong with this patch? I installed it when I had 1 hour left on my battery. Then I shut it down and when I turn it back on i have 10 minutes left. Anyone know whats happening? Is it the patch or it has to do with my battery? It's a 9 cell and I haven't used the computer alot, this is probably my 5th time using it.

 

Just tried these updates, but the large of the two (9mb?) has mad eit impossible to watch TV through windows media center

 

Interesting, thats not a very good update for you then.
What about try uninstalling the updates?

 

Nope tried that, no difference. May need to syste restore

 

is this included in the autoupdate program? I downloaded one yesterday or two days ago dont knwo if this was included.