Microsoft today announced that Service Pack 1 (SP1) of Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing. Eagerly anticipated by Vista aficionados around the world, SP1 will be initially available in five languages—English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. Users will be able to download SP1 beginning in mid-March, as Microsoft is timing its release to coincide with the retail availability of new systems pre-installed with SP1.
The beta testing of Vista SP1 identified device drivers which were improperly designed and likely to cause system incompatibilities with SP1. As such, Microsoft will be making SP1 available to Vista users in mid-March via Windows Update, which will look for the presence of problematic drivers and not install on the systems it finds with the drivers. No further details about who made the drivers, or the devices or specific technical problems have been given by Microsoft, but the company says it is currently working with some of their its hardware partners to make the necessary adjustments.
Here's the full schedule: Mid-March will see selected languages of SP1 made available via the Microsoft Download Center and on Windows Update. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install SP1. Mid-April will see SP1 pushed to systems with the automatic update option enabled. Full language support for SP1 will also come in April.
SP1 will address many of the issues bugging users since the release of Vista. Microsoft says it includes more than 300 hot fixes covering everything from data protection to video performance. In particular, copying and moving files should be up to 50 percent faster, and waking a Vista PC from sleep should be much faster. According to the Windows Vista Blog, anecdotal evidence points to systems running faster and more reliably on a SP1 system; our experience with SP1 builds leads us to agree.
Since the release of Vista last year, the conventional wisdom has been that most businesses and a fair amount of users would wait until the release of SP1 to make the transition from XP (or Win2K) to Vista. If Microsoft can deliver the goods with SP1—and it appears that the company will—Vista should get a significant boost where it needs it most.
If you've been holding out on installing Vista, are you going to jump on board once SP1 arrives next month?
