The first service pack for Microsoft Windows Vista operating system won’t arrive until early next year, but judging from many experience with a beta of SP1, the update will be more about stability and security fixes than noticeable performance gains.

What is Improved
Many alterations in this service pack, the tested version of 0.275 won’t be obvious to a casual user. You probably won’t notice any interface changes, for example.

Instead, Microsoft says, the service pack beta improves stability, performance, and reliability when reactivating a machine from Hibernate or Suspend mode; enhances device-driver support; increases security; and adds support for new standards such as Extended File Allocation Table (intended to enhance flash storage on notebooks, not desktops).

According to Microsoft, typical load times for the final version should range from 30 to 60 minutes. The installation requires 7GB of free hard-drive space (some of which will be reclaimed after the installation is complete), though the finalized install file itself is expected to be a 50MB download via Windows Update.

In early tests with the beta, some small improvements in boot time on an HP Compaq 8710p Core 2 Duo notebook. Before SP1, the laptop took 1 minute, 51 seconds to boot. After the update, that figure dropped by almost 20 seconds.

Microsoft is also touting improvements in the speed of copying and extracting files, so that also tested a few of those scenarios. Noted that a slight increase in the time required to copy 562 JPEG images totalling 1.9GB from an SD Card to the hard drive of the a fore mentioned HP Compaq notebook.

In another test, Nero 7 Ultra on an Acer Aspire 5630 Core 2 Duo laptop were tested to add files to a disk image. After SP1 installed, the notebook built the disk image about 7 percent faster.

There aren’t many grab-bag utilities that do a lot of different, handy things these days, but Transfz is just such a utility, and you will wonder how you lived without it. Consuming hardly any RAM or CPU cycles (the executable is just 320KB), Transfz just sits in the Taskbar tray awaiting its hotkey, and then it leaps into action to make your computing life a little easier.

Before describing what it does, here is how to use it. Just highlight a word or set of words within a document or program, including text fields in Web browsers, and press CTRL-D. A pop-up menu appears that offers all sorts of handy features and commands that work with the selected text.

Arguably, the most useful is an Internet Lookup command, which instantly opens your browser (or a new tab) and Googles for the selected text. If you don’t care for Google, then Transfz can use Wikipedia, IMDb, Slashdot, the BBC, or any of about 10 online searching tools.

The next is a permanent clipboard of which stores and displays the 10 most recent Clipboard items. This allows you to copy several things to the clipboard at once and then paste them all again at once, with no tedious back and forth between windows or applications. There are also text formatting options that can change all the selected text to ALL CAPS, Upper Case, lower case, and so forth. It can also insert the current time and/or date at the cursor, count the number of selected words, or search and replace within your selection.

A small but growing list of plug-ins are adding more features to Transfz almost weekly, and there is no arguing with the price free. But it seems to make keypress sticky within Office 2007. Hopefully this bug will get chased out as the product goes from beta to final.

URL: www.transfz.com