Microsoft to deliver Vista SP1 beta by mid-July

July 8, 2007 |

Microsoft to deliver Vista SP1 beta by mid-July

By Jonathan Schlaffer

Microsoft to deliver Vista SP1 beta by mid-July

After many rumors and many denials by Microsoft that it was in fact, even working on Vista SP1, the company is now saying that Vista SP1 beta will be delivered by mid-July 2007.

This comes after it denied rumors that Vista SP1 beta would even see the light of day before 2008 and after rumors that Vista SP1 beta would be available sometime in September.

While Microsoft avoided questions about a final ship date for Vista SP1, it appears that a final version of Vista SP1 is looking more like November 2007.

Those of you expecting radical changes in Vista will be disappointed, Vista SP1 is designed to enhance or supplement existing features already present. According to Cnet, some of the changes include:

-Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines
-Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD
-Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
-Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
-Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole
-Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes

-The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
-Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

And perhaps some things Microsoft has yet to reveal. The future looks bright but Vista SP1 is probably going to bring (possibly) some more compatibility problems. The question is, who among our readers is going to be brave enough to test it or is it going to be up to me? Okay, I’ll do it but just this once.