Vista SP1 planned for Q1 2008, beta in weeks

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 29 August 2007 23:43

Business IT - Technology

Product manager on the Microsoft Vista launch team Nick White has announced on the company blog that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is planned to be released to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008, with a beta released within weeks. For many Vista users frustrated by performance, reliability and compatibility issues, the impending release will come not a minute to soon.

The release of Vista SP1 has been aligned to coincide with the release of the long awaited Windows Server 2008, which is also targeted for the first quarter of next year.

The announcement follows the release of a Microsoft whitepaper that details what improvements will found in Vista SP1, such as eliminating many of the causes of crashes and hangs, and improving the speed of copying files, improving the speed of Internet Explorer 7 and a range of others.

White's blog posting contains tacit acknowledgement of some of the major issues facing Vista and indicates that SP1 has been designed to fix them rather than add new features to the operating system.

"SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues we’ve identified via customer feedback, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards," says White.

"SP1 also makes additional improvements to the IT administration experience. We didn’t design SP1 as a vehicle for releasing new features; however, some existing components do gain enhanced functionality in SP1."

According to White, a beta release will be available to a wide group of testers in the next few weeks, after an initial closed pre-beta trial that was recently revealed.

"We made the choice to start with a very small group of testers because we think it’s better for both our customers and for Microsoft to keep the beta program small at the start," White says.

"A later pre-release of SP1 will be available to a larger group of testers  via MSDN and TechNet subscribers."

Those banking on a Q1 2008 version of Vista SP1, however, had better not hold their breath too hard. As always, Microsoft is giving itself plenty of wriggle room for project slippage.

"We're targeting releasing SP1 to manufacturing in the first quarter of 2008, but as always, we’re first and foremost focused on delivering a high-quality release, so we'll determine the exact release date of SP1 after we have reached that quality bar."