Microsoft announces Vista SP1 RTM

Written by Tim Smalley

February 4, 2008 | 15:35

Tags: #101 #directx #exfat #fixes #mike #nash #performance #reliability #rtm #sp1 #uefi #update #updates #vista #windows

Companies: #microsoft

Mike Nash, a member of the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft, today announced that the software giant has released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to manufacturing for English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish versions of the operating system.

"Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program," he explained. "With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility."

Don't think that you'll be getting the Service Pack tomorrow though, as Nash outlined the availability plan on the Windows Vista Blog. Starting in mid-March, Microsoft will make the Service Pack available for download via Windows Update and the Download Centre on Microsoft.com. In mid-April, the company will then roll out Windows Vista SP1 to those who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically.

Nash said that if there are any systems that Windows Update determines to have a driver that is known to not update successfully, they will not be given SP1 automatically. " As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1. The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience."

For those wondering what has changed in Windows Vista Service Pack 1, Microsoft released a 17-page change log, which outlines the fine details of the new build.

The improvements include support for the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) on 64-bit versions of the OS, DirectX 10.1, and exFAT – a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices. There are many more improvements and fixes, but I'll save you from a massive list and let you go and read them if you're especially interested.

Is the list of changes enough to make you upgrade to Windows Vista once SP1 is made available via Windows Update, or would you rather stay away from Microsoft's latest OS completely? Tell us your plans in the forums.
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