So, this past Monday Microsoft released SP1 in both standalone and slipstream ISO form.  So I proceeded to connect and downloaded both flavors and prepped my machine for install.  I decided to go with the standalone installation on my machine and do an in place upgrade.  All was going well untill the final reboot and then BOOM, BSOD in ntdll.dll.  Had to be something about a missing file but I just could not figure it out, nothing would work, not even safemode.  Great, my install is hosed and I was really not in the mood to be wiping my box for a clean install.  Unfortunately, it turned out that was the only option.  So I slapped the slipstream x64 dvd into my drive and booted off it and did my install which went without a hitch.

After booting into Vista and getting all of my stuff setup I started poking around to see what was new.  First thing I noticed was a SIGNIFICANT increase in performance, which is a much welcome change over Vista RTM.  I also noticed (almost instantly) that the Search entry in the start menu was missing (not the search field but the link to the advanced search window).  I really cannot understand why this was removed just because of google’s incessant crying?  I mean, just let google plug their indexing engine into windows and use the windows UI to do searches but make use of whatever engine the user selects via Program Defaults.

Other than the mentioned items, and the standalone hosing my system (now I remember why I HATE standalone SP Installs), I have to say my experience thus far with Vista SP1 has been a pleasant one, and it’s nice to see Microsoft once again unifying the client/server codebase.