Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Finally Officially Announced
Microsoft finally admitted in a public official way that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 actually does exist. They pretty much confirmed most of the leaks, and announced that a beta is coming in mid-September, just over two weeks away.
The Windows Vista Team Blog has a post making the announcement, and they said that they are in the process of deploying a beta of SP1. They also said that Service Packs are less of an important part of operating systems than they used to be, as witnessed by the Performance and Reliability patches that were pushed out through Windows Update yesterday.
A small group of testers have already been testing SP1, with the beta coming through in the next few weeks. Later on, a pre-release version of SP1 will be distributed to MSDN and TechNet subscribers (possibly an RC1 or something), leading up to Release To Manufacturing and a public release in the first quarter of 2008, the same time as Windows Server 2008.
Mary Jo Foley has more details, including that the beta will be distributed to 10-15,000 testers in mid-September via the Connect site, followed by a broader beta later (which seems to contradict what the Vista Team Blog said). The features are mostly those we’ve heard already:
- Support for Direct 3D 10.1
- support for Secure Digital (SD) Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA) to improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization
- Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files, shut down and resume Vista machines
- Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
- Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
- The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
- Improvements to battery life by reducing CPU utilization be “not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain computers”
The Service Pack should be about 50 megabytes to download, 1 gigabyte on a standalone install DVD. Ed Bott writes that Vista SP1 will not contain the “Fiji” update to Windows Media Center, but we kind of expected that. SP1 will contain changes to Windows Vista Search to satisfy antitrust complaints. Ed also lists these fixes:
- Improved reliability and compatibility of Windows Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
- Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
- Improved Windows Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
- Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
- Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
- Increased reliability and performance of Windows Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.
- Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
- Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
- Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
- Improves performance of Windows® Internet Explorer® 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and speeding JavaScript parsing.
- Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
- Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.
