Yes, it matters

Often at customer engagements when I encourage them to use things like SCCM and SCUP along with HP or Dell SCUP integration to keep drivers (and firmware!) up to date, I’m told it isn’t worth it.  If the drivers from 2006 work, it doesn’t matter if an update is out.

More often than not, the reason I’m there in the first place is to analyze and solve slow boot/client performance….

These two statements above are connected, I promise.

Lets take a walk through my Dell e6500’s life cycle for example.  When I started in PFE I was issued a Dell e6500 laptop with 8 gig of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive.  BIOS rev A08.

Lets look JUST at BIOS as an example:

Line item 4.  Slow boot performance (a user isn’t going to understand it’s a PXE issue, they just complain it boots slow)

But wait, there’s more…

 

Line 1 is interesting.  If you were rolling out Windows 7 to this machine, it MIGHT work with previous BIOS versions, but wouldn’t it be cool to be in a supported configuration from the company who made the hardware?

And look, Line 3, updated the Nvidia BIOS, either we’re fixing something or making it faster…

And hey, Line 6, access speed for PCMCIA cards.

Hey look, Ambient Light Sensor “improved support” for Windows 7.  Wonder if that fixes my slow boot issue I blogged about previously on ALSSVC64.exe adding 20 seconds to my boot time…

Ah, we remove, REMOVE, AAM on line 2.  Remember I blogged about this, the feature to slow your hard drive so it boots your system slow but doesn’t make noise…

But I digress.

Hey look, line 4.  Nvidia BIOS update again.  Fixes problems or improves performance (or why was it written?).

Am I picking on Dell here?  NO!  Does Dell make bad hardware and this is why there are so many fixes?  NO!  Every vendor with a brain makes stuff that can be upgraded.  Does anyone recall back when the old Pentiums had the divide by 0 bug?  And hardware was replaced/RMA’d?  Yeah.  Updates = good.  It means the vendor is servicing the product line, taking feedback and aggregating service call data and improving their product for you, the end user/company.

Note that none of these BIOS improvements cost anything except the time to download and apply them.  Free performance gains.

My laptop took a nose dive off a desk last week, so I am lacking in good solid pictures to prove the gains, but they are appreciable.

 

Ok great, lets look at something you paid for, Anti-Virus!

I am NOT naming this product, it’s a picture example of what a simple update from one version to another can do to the disk IO at boot.  Note that AV engine updates are usually pretty simple to roll out in an enterprise.

PRE update:

POST update:

 

Tell me, which sytem would you rather want to be on?  Given we’re looking at the disk activity from 0 seconds to 230 seconds, and more disk activity is more likely going to mean a lack of responsiveness, I’ll go with POST myself.

Ok, what was the point of this rant?

Glad you asked.  Computers are like anything else.  Our bodies, our cars, our homes, our loved ones, all require maintenance and care.  Give your computer some love today, go to your vendors site, see if any updates are out there, and apply them if they are appropriate, if they make sense, you know?

SCUP and System Center are a great way to keep things current, with an approval process, in a large environment, and I think they are worth investigating.  Or why not, when rolling out that new image, include a BIOS update as part of the task sequence?

XPERF, from the WPT, is the way to analyze the impact.  Like in the screen scrapes above.  The ONLY change made, was an AV engine update.  Easy to look at this and say “Yeah, that’s an improvement”.  If its such a subtle thing in a test that you can’t tell, chances are it’s not worth rolling it out in the enterprise you manage.

Food for thought.

Jeff