A lot of expectations have been formed around the about-to-be-released Vista SP1, which is expected to put an end to all the small and large bugs and memory hogging issues of the Microsoft Flagship OS (which is also available on Microsoft’s OEM partner sites). However, high expectations might not be met, especially regarding the speed increase issues, as CNET reports.

According to CNET, early tests of SP1 indicate that while there are some performance enhancements to be had, they’re mostly driver related — so if you’ve been updating all along, you won’t see much of an improvement.

What’s worse, certain tasks like copying files to USB 2.0 hard drives have gotten around 50 percent slower, a speed hit that overshadows the other file system improvements in SP1. All in all, though, it looks like SP1 is a worthwhile update — just don’t expect anything to get noticeably faster.

Even still, keeping in view the previous history of Windows XP, where SP1 did fix quite a few bugs, I do hope that SP1 will do something good, let alone install all the security patches in one cumulative pack.