Vista hack allows early downloads of SP1
By Jonathan Schlaffer
If you’re just itching to get your hands on the Vista SP1 beta then you’ve come to the right place. A certain hack has been floating around that lets any installation of Vista download and install SP1 beta.
Before proceeding it should be noted that the legality of this has been called into question because it is an unauthorized download but it is also directly from Microsoft (legal) and not from a Torrent (illegal) and I am no lawyer so proceed at your own risk.
This should also not be performed on a system that needs to be reliable as introducing a beta service pack may have unforeseen consequences so if you do decide to go through with it, use a secondary computer or test system.
Having said that, I had mixed success with it, the first step went easily enough but I could not get the second update to download, either Microsoft has somehow (already) blocked this or my luck is just bad.
If you still want to proceed then the instructions can be found at Ghacks but please keep in mind what I said above, it may (or may not) cause stability issues and this falls on the gray side of the law.
On a side note, several torrent sites have what is supposed to be the SP1 beta, it is not recommended to acquire it from those sources because 1) it’s illegal and 2) some sites have been reporting that while the files do contain SP1, it also contains malware that may not be detectable until it is too late.
It might be a smarter move just to sit and wait for Microsoft to release the public beta which, at last report, is still due before the end of this year.
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October 20th, 2007
There is really only one reason why I regret using Vista (not that I had any choice, it came with my new laptop…): it is slow.
You see, products have jobs to do and each product has a “job zero”, the one job that it has to do well no matter what. Only when you finish perfecting this angle of your product can you go on and work on the others. Job zero of an operating system is allowing all applications to run fast. As fast as possible. My Vista, on a new and strong Thinkpad X61, is slowing me down on every task. Instead of gaining productivity I am losing productivity, waiting for the giant to wake up.
Lesson learned: if you design a product make sure you define its job zero and make it perfect. If you are out to upgrade your customers, make sure that job zero in the new product is at least as good as it used to be in the previous version (ho, how I miss XP…) because no matter how many jobs you added, they will never forgive you if you mess up with job zero.