Vista SP1 go for launch on March 18
Ladies and gentlemen, fire up your automatic updates; Vista SP1 is set to be delivered via Windows Update, tomorrow, March 18. Microsoft doesn’t believe that Service Packs are an important milestone any more but try telling that to the throngs of users disappointed with Vista.
Many are predicting that with the release of Vista SP1, the operating system may finally be seen as a serious competitor in the business world. With many enterprises and business customers perfectly happy with XP, they saw no need to upgrade to Vista. Their programs work, their hardware works but all that will change with Vista; even if it has SP1.
The Vista SP1 update is reported to be available on March 18 with retail copies hitting store shelves on March 19. According to Computer World, Microsoft said it had to delay the release of Vista SP1 because of problematic drivers that didn’t work properly after the upgrade. Systems that have those specific drivers install will not receive the Vista SP1 update. The company refused to state which drivers were causing the problems.
It is also advisable to have up-to-date versions of all your programs installed; especially firewall, anti-virus and other security software you might be using as will be they most likely to cause problems during the upgrade process.
I’ve been running Vista SP1 for about three weeks now, it’s okay but it’s certainly not the cure-all some expect it to be. Certain programs will still have limited functionality in the operating system, the driver situation isn’t any better (nor is it worse) and there are very little improvements users will notice.
The noticeable changes include faster boot/shutdown/sleep/resume times and the USB issues when resuming from sleep or hibernate appear to have been addressed; other than that there isn’t much to look forward too. There are some under the hood changes, updates to the Windows Installer Service, for example but that doesn’t do most of us any good.
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March 20th, 2008
This is good news for Microsoft users … I would hope. It seems that they are finally releasing a product that is what they initially intended Vista to be. I will be interested to see if this will draw some people finally away from XP and earlier versions of Windows (since so many have chosen to keep earlier versions, possibly waiting for this one to be ready and usable). I think it can be said that Microsoft has tried to respond to the concerns people have had about Vista from its initial introduction. People often expect things to happen much faster than they have in the past with technology improvements because of the sheer number of things happening in the industry at any given moment. But regardless of how long it took to arrive at a program that works more efficiently, I think it’s a good sign that something new is happening.