Vista SP1 beta due ‘next week’ – stay away!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 09 July 2007 18:57

Opinion and Analysis

Although Vista’s first service pack was known to be coming this year, the news is that the SP1 beta comes in the week of July 16, with the final due in November – but unless you’re really having problems with Vista, don’t install it!

ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has uncovered the news that Vista’s ‘Service Pack 1’, or SP1 , will reach beta status and be released to the public sometime in the week of July 16.

According to Foley’s blog, users can expect Vista SP1 to offer, amongst other things, “performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines”, “support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices”, “improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption” and an “improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections”.

It will offer more than that, of course, but these are the things that most consumers will actually notice. Foley seems to suggest that Microsoft now has a new policy, which will now be to under-promise and over-deliver, instead of the other way around, and she suggests that the ‘early’ appearance of the Vista SP1 is a prime example of this new Microsoft ‘policy’.

The thing is, Vista SP1 has been slated to arrive in the second half of 2007 for some time now, and with only four months from the beta SP1 release date to the actual ‘final’ SP1 release date in November, it was about time to actually get a beta of SP1 out the door so some user feedback could start flowing into Microsoft ASAP.

So, to me at least, nothing Microsoft has done with the upcoming beta SP1 release suggests that Microsoft is now going to magically start under-promising and over-delivering. I guess we’ll have to see on that one – the track record on this issue has almost always been the opposite, with the example of many Vista features dropped, many delays before Vista shipped and plenty of Vista driver issues (i.e. non-availability) that has admittedly improved markedly over the past few months.

Releasing an SP1 to the public will remove the excuse that many consumers and businesses are currently using in their delay to moving to Vista, which is that they’ll wait for an SP1 before making the Vista plunge.

Of course, given the driver issues and the simple common sense that it’s good for the bugs to be worked out of any system before taking the plunge has meant that many have benefitted enormously by not jumping on the Vista bandwagon from day one.

My own Vista experiences have been markedly different from those of most pundits out there who have been quick to slam the Vista OS. I’ve been running it since Vista RC1 way back in mid-2006, and for the most part (aside from a few niggly driver issues which ended up being solved by Vista driver updates and which weren’t dealbreakers for me anyway), Vista has been the best version of Windows ever, period.

The claimed ‘slow copying’ problem of Vista, which the upcoming SP1 is meant to fix, doesn’t seem to have appeared on my own personal computer or on the computers of those whom I’ve helped to upgrade, and by-and-large, Vista has been a fantastic experience.

That said, everyone’s mileage always varies, and the ‘bad’ experiences people have had have been great reasons for people to wait until the dust settles. Well, with SP1 arriving in November, some of that dust truly is settling and starting to build up, just inviting you to swipe your finger through it to see how thick it has become.

But it’s still July, and November is four months away. With my own Vista set-up working just fine, I’m not going to risk putting a beta copy of SP1 on my machine and taking the risk of stuffing it up.

Of course I took the risk of Vista RC1 as my primary, production operating system last year, which some would say is crazy, and if that’s the case, why I am so worried about an SP1 beta?

Well, simply because everything is working fine, and I don’t need any beta SP1 oopsies to come along and ruin my day. After all, things have more-or-less been going so swimmingly that I just don’t need to take a chance on having an actual bad Vista experience!

So, I’ll be happily waiting until November to get all that SP1 goodness, and unless it’s part of your job to beta test operating systems and service packs, I happily advise you to wait until November too.