Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 – RTM

Microsoft Windows Vista Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 has officially been released to manufacturing:

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released to manufacturing today and will start being available to customers in March, starting with Microsoft Volume Licensing customers……Windows Vista SP1 includes quality improvements that help enhance reliability, security and performance.

You can read the full press release here (Microsoft.com).

Some interesting information:
– It will be released through an Windows Update as an option to existing customers in Mid-March if you do not have any driver issues with SP1 – SP1 contains some driver issues/problems and will not automatically install on those machines. This will be for English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.
– Windows Vista users who have updates set to download and install automatically will receive SP1 in mid-April, although, again, systems that have known driver issues will not receive it automatically. Once those drivers are fixed and received through Windows Update (automatically), then it will be turned on and installed.
– All other languages not being released in March will be released to manufacturing in April.

More from the Windows Vista Team Blog (excerpts):

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. With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility. One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with the latest builds of our products — I’ve personally been running Windows Vista SP1 pretty exclusively for a few months and I’ve noticed that my systems run faster and more reliably than they did with the “Gold” release of Windows Vista.

SP1 also includes changes focused on improving the performance of Windows Vista in areas that impact the customer experience the most. For instance, with SP1, copying or moving files around your PC, your home network or your corporate network should now be much faster — up to 50% faster in some scenarios (according to our internal tests). In addition, on many kinds of hardware, resuming a Windows Vista-based PC from sleep is faster on Service Pack 1.