Microsoft 64-bit Vista SP1 early release snafu

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 23 February 2008 03:07

Opinion and Analysis

Users of the 64-bit version of Vista may have noticed something strange over the last couple of days – a notification that Vista SP1 has downloaded to their computers and is ready for installation, despite availability still set for March 18. Has Microsoft gone mad?

Something really strange is going on at Microsoft. Cynics will say that has always been the case, but really, the stuff-ups and snafus have gone into overdrive in the past three weeks, with the Vista era set to be remembered as one of Microsoft’s most turbulent times, when whatever they did turned into trouble with a capital T.

The stuff up revolves around Vista SP1 being available for some 64-bit users of Vista- not only available, but already downloaded onto their computers, weeks before Microsoft intended. Ironically, the snafu occurred after I had written a story called “The Vista SP1 saga: the best ad for Mac and Linux yet?” 

One of our readers had written to us yesterday to advise their 64-bit Vista system had received the SP1 update. They decided to install it, with the installation process taking about an hour, and once it had finished, everything seemed to be working ok.

Presumably this reader hadn’t been using any of the anti-virus or Internet security programs listed by Microsoft at their support site as being incompatible with Vista SP1, although to be fair to Microsoft most (but not all) of the affected programs now have updates available to restore compatibility.

So, what happened at Microsoft? ZDNet received an update from Microsoft that stated:

"Since releasing SP1 to manufacturing on February 4th, we have made Windows Vista SP1 available to beta testers, MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers, as well as Volume Licensing customers. Today, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC. For general availability, we are still planning to make SP1 broadly available in the mid-March time frame."

Please read onto page 2.