I realize that Microsoft likes to keep its company secrets like all companies do but ever since the launch of Vista earlier this year, it was a well known public fact that Service Pack 1 for Vista was already in the works. What mystifies me and others is why Microsoft continues to lie or refuse to comment about Vista SP1 in public.

Paul Thurrott of the WinSuperSite says several employees from Microsoft all the way up to Steve Ballmer act as if they don’t know what Vista SP1 is, if it is even in development or when it will ship. It is all but a public fact that Vista SP1 will ship by the end of 2007. More specifically it is going to ship with Longhorn Server in the third quarter of this year.

Nonetheless, Microsoft would rather continue along the lines of “we’re not going to comment on service packs for Vista at this time” just doesn’t make any sense. Take any search engine, type in Vista SP1 and among other things you will get results for the release date.

Many think that Vista was not ready when it released in January, given its recent security flaws and some lack of functionality it comes as no surprise that many people will be waiting for Vista SP1 to ship before upgrading. But wait… we have all these consumers that bought into the express upgrade program which is just useless.

Useless because you get upgrade discs, useless because you can’t reinstall Vista without first installing XP and useless because you can’t transfer the license. On top of all that once SP1 ships it will go like this if they want to reinstall Vista, reinstall XP, install Vista, and install Vista SP1. I’ve discussed that before so I won’t go into it again. What’s more is Vista SP1 has almost no security patches at all, it is about optimizing the OS and increasing or fixing some functionality issues.

Until a few weeks ago, Ethan Allen had posted what he called a Vista Service Pack 1 Preview on his blog which included 100 hotfixes that were supposedly going to be in the final release of Vista SP1. Microsoft’s legal team quickly silenced him and forced him to take down the patch downloads. The question is why; he was using Microsoft’s Knowledge Base as his source.

Still that did not stop Microsoft from squelching his download section and issuing this warning to consumers “It is important for Microsoft to work directly with customers to ensure they are downloading a hot fix that may be designed to resolve a specific technical issue, rather than having them download haphazardly from other websites.” Translate that to mean download from third party sites at your own risk.

I am not suggesting you download from third party sites at all, especially if they claim to be offering hotfixes for any operating system but when you can see the person used Microsoft as their source and the downloads are virus and spyware free, what’s the harm?

Even Microsoft’s own ANI patch has caused instabilities in Vista causing random crashing, crash restart loops and other ills. The point is you really can’t trust anyone to produce a reliable patch these days, not even Microsoft.

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Related:

Vista Service Pack 1 site gets cease and desist order from Microsoft

Microsoft’s Windows Vista SP release date

Microsoft releases last prerequisite Vista updates in preparation of SP1 release

Microsoft: No Vista service pack for you

Vista SP1 compounds existing compatibility issues

Entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 4:56 am under Upgrading, Vista.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.