NEARLY A YEAR STARTED hitting desktops, Service Pack 1 (SPI) is in its beta run. Many updates, like driver and app-support expansions, are hidden, but there are visible changes that OS wonks will appreciate, and even some for everyday users. For starters, Microsoft tackles a common complaint with Vista-its speed (or lack thereof). I found the entire OS more responsive: Dialog boxes appear more quickly, switching among open windows goes faster, memory-intensive programs seem snappier, and returning from hibernation takes around half as long.

One performance improvement I haven't been able to confirm, however, is tweaks to improve battery life on certain laptops. The newly drive-agnostic BitLocker marks another improvement. The feature, built into Vista so that users could encrypt entire drives, originally functioned only with the drive from which the OS boots. SPIlets you use BitLocker with any drive-as long as your motherboard contains a Trusted Plat¬form Module (TPM) chip. Another addition-one that hard-core gamers will particularly appreciate brings Direct3D 10.1 to Vista.

The remaining improvements are more arcane, but some are worth pointing out. First are the new APIs for third-party anti-malware vendors-a community some felt were snubbed in Vista's earlier iterations. With SPI on 64-bit Vista, third-party anti-malware programs gain access to new application programming interfaces. That lets these utilities directly extend the Windows kernel to provide lower-level detection of malicious code .

Other security tweaks include remote desktop and group policy management changes. The new ability to sign remote desktop files provides increased security for anyone using the Remote Desktop Protocol to connect with other PCs. The Group Management Policy Console (GMPC) has disappeared, and the Group Policy editor (GPEdit) focuses on local instead of global policy. The goal: leaving strategic group policy decisions in the hands of systems administrators rather than users. Seems sensible.

Finally, a couple of geeky tweaks. First, there's expanded x64 Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) support. With SPI, x64 machines can perform network boots from an EFI device; Vista originally supported only EFIs for IA-64 machines. Additionally, Vista SPI supports the Extended File Allocation Table drive partition system, which is used by a number of Flash devices.

SPI is a useful set of updates, speeding up some operations and enhancing third-party program compatibility, but it changes little that you'd notice day to day. The bulk of the effort has gone toward upgrading security subsystems.

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