Improve Vistaâ€™s Disk Performance by 15% without SP1

Hard Disk Microsoft released a slew of updates on Tuesday, which extended beyond security related fixes. They also made available the Release Candidate for Service Pack 1, which among other things, is said to improve performance when copying and moving files. If you’re running Vista on your production machine, you probably won’t want to install SP1 RC, as it’s not quite ready for prime time. You can now get the disk performance improvements without installing SP1 RC through an official Microsoft Update that was also released on Tuesday.

Referred to simply as a ‘reliability’ update, KB943899 is said to “improve performance, responsiveness, and reliability of Windows Vista in various scenarios”. The three main fixes included are:

You receive a “Stop 0×000000A0″ error when you try to switch the computer to the hibernate state.
You receive a “Stop 0×0000009f” error when you switch the computer to the hibernate state or to the standby state. Or, you receive this Stop error when you resume the computer from the hibernate state or from the standby state. This problem occurs on a computer that has a wireless network connection.
The disk does not spin down after a specified time of inactivity.

After mentioning those fixes, almost as an afterthought, it states:

Additionally, this update can help improve performance when you perform operations that are related to large disk I/O. After you apply this update, you may notice up to a 15 percent performance improvement in some copying operations and when moving some large files.

That’s an awful nice ‘by-the-way’. This is listed as an Update, not a Hotfix, so it has gone through quality control and should be ready for your production Vista installs. So, grab the 32-bit or the 64-bit update and give it a try. Leave a note on your experience, did it make any difference on your machine?