Microsoft announces Vista SP1 Beta

This week, the Microsoft Windows Vista Team announced details about the official beta of Vista Service Pack 1.

With the private beta having been leaked and done the rounds for the last few weeks (read our in-depth analysis here), Microsoft’s announcement doesn’t carry very many surprises. Still, it’s always informative to get the update straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

As expected, SP1 will contain all the updates currently available for Windows Vista. However, Microsoft aren’t holding off on deploying updates while waiting for the service pack’s release. Various non-critical but customer-driven updates have been released via Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center (namely the performance and reliability updates), and with Vista so closely tied to online Microsoft services, it’s good to see that being made use of.

However, SP1 contains more than just patches and hotfixes. It will extend Vista’s functionality in various areas, namely reliability and performance (as we’ve already seen), administration experience and support for emerging hardware and standards. All the available technical detail is in the SP1 Beta Whitepaper, but here’s a summary or what to expect:

Reliability/Performance/Security

• Enhanced communication with Windows Security Center
• Improved x64 kernel support for third-party security vendors
• RDP file signing
• Elliptical Curve Cryptography number generator (PRNG)
• Improved Bitlocker Drive Encryption (BDE)
• Improved reliability and compatibility for:
• newer graphics cards
• external laptop displays
• networking
• Windows XP-upgraded systems
• printer drivers
• entering and resuming from sleep
• Improved speed when:
• copying and extracting files
• resuming from Hibernation and Resuming
• domain PCs are operating on the domain
• Improves IE7 performance, especially in CPU utilisation and parsing Javascript
• Improved battery life via fewer calls on the CPU and screen re-drawing
• Faster logon procedure
• Faster browsing of network shares

Administration

• Bitlocker can now encrypt local volumes other than the C: drive
• Fixes problems printing to printers in Terminal Service sessions
• Network Diagnostic tool will be able to fix problems with file sharing
• Disk Defragmenter can target specific volumes

Emerging Hardware/Standards

• Flash memory storage will use exFAT files system, fully supported in Vista SP1
• Support for SD-DMA (Secure Digital Advanced Direct Memory Access)
• 64-bit PCs will be able to boot using the EFI, which is currently only supported on IA-64 machines
• Added support for Direct3D 10.1
• Added support for SSTP (Secure Socket Tunnelling Protocol)

The standalone service pack is likely to be fairly chunky (around 1GB in size for x86 machines), and is anticipated to need quite a lot of hard drive space to install (approximately 7GB for x86 and a whopping 12GB for x64 – this is not insubstantial). The update will support all language packs so it can be installed on any version of Vista. Given the size of the standalone update however, an English-only version might be prudent.

The service pack will be installable via three methods:

• Express – an individual machine connects to the Internet and downloads only the necessary files. This uses far less drive space and would be a good method of updating an SOE or home machines with a broadband connection
• Standalone – this functions like a standard hotpatch and is convenient for updating multiple machines. Does require a large one-off download
• Slipstream – while users can use the standalone package to slipstream their own Windows Vista media, all post-SP1 versions of Vista media will have SP1 slipstreamed into it. Users can use this media to deploy Vista SP1 to new machines, or do an upgrade install. Volume License customers will be able to download the slipstreamed media

Microsoft anticipate that SP1 Beta will be released to the public within a few weeks, and then a later SP1 pre-release will be made available to testers via MSDN and TechNet subscribers (and via BitTorrent for everyone else).

The final release is still scheduled for the first quarter of 2008, and it’s tied very closely to the Windows 2008 engineering cycle, as has been commonly known for some time.

Given that Microsoft has been pretty good about releasing Vista updates ahead of SP1, this may reduce any reluctance on the part of users and businesses to hold off upgrading to Vista until SP1 is released. Of course from what we’ve already experienced, Vista SP1 looks to be a far better experience than plain ‘ol Vista, but the Vista experience so far hasn’t been bad at all, and it’s probable that by the time SP1 is released, a fully-patched Vista machine will be largely indistinguishable from a brand-new SP1 system. However, the fate of that particular forecast is well and truly in Microsoft’s hands.