James Bannan05 February 2008, 4:37 AM
The long-anticipated Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing (RTM) so we should be seeing it hitting our machines in the not-too-distant future. But will SP1 overcome the negative perceptions which have plagued Vista since its release? Microsoft certainly hope it will.
On Monday morning US time, Mike Nash of the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft announced that Windows Vista SP1 has been released to manufacturing (RTM).
 Mike Nash |
Vista SP1 will be released in two waves. The first release is for the main five languages which Windows supports – English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. OEMs are the first group to receive the update, so that they can get down to marketing systems with SP1 pre-installed. Ordinary users shouldn’t expect to see the service pack made available to them until mid-March, when it will be accessible via Microsoft Downloads and Windows Update.
Interestingly, SP1 beta testers indentified a number of device drivers which caused problems with the SP1 installation. According to Nash “...these drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices. Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers. While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.”
As such, Windows Update will check whether a Vista-based system checking in has any of those drivers and if so, it simply won’t offer SP1 as an installation option. This doesn’t mean that affected systems can’t download SP1, but they will need to specifically request it, rather than having it automatically offered.
Systems which have Windows updates configured to install automatically won’t be offered SP1 until mid-April. Again, problematic drivers will block SP1 from being automatically installed, but as updated drivers become available and are installed via Windows Update, affected systems will be able to access the SP1 delivery service. Around the same time as this, SP1 for the remaining supporting languages will RTM.
Vista SP1 is an important milestone for Microsoft. Windows Vista has had a very mixed reception since it’s release, with some users finding it a worthy successor to Windows XP, while others found some of the more problematic features like sluggish network access and file browsing far too annoying to be ignored. Others still found that the changes Microsoft made to the underlying system architecture crippled their systems, sending them scurrying back to Windows XP with a bitter Vista-flavoured aftertaste.
SP1 is very much designed to rectify a lot of these issues, particularly the performance-based problems. Microsoft have been working with software and hardware vendors to increase Vista’s compatibility with as many products on the market as possible, and the simple amount of time which has passed since Vista’s release has certainly helped the situation.
But there’s no denying that Microsoft has a heck of a lot riding on Vista SP1. Although Vista sales have been encouraging, if not exactly spectacular, Microsoft has some serious perception problems to overcome. The big question is whether Vista SP1 will go down as another triumphant Windows 98 SE, rescuing an operating system plagued with problems (both real and imagined), or as another dismal Windows ME, something to be forgotten as quickly as possible.