[Offtopic] Vista Service Pack 1

[Stephen Loosley]

Vista Service Pack 1 Earlier Than Expected 

Nathan Weinberg (Via: http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=559>

... Microsoft has customers, partners and competitors believing that it was going to delay the first service pack for Vista ­ not releasing a first beta of it until just before year-end ­ the company is set to deliver Beta 1 of Vista SP1 in mid-July.

Word (from various sources who asked not to be named) is Microsoft is gearing up to drop Vista SP1 some time the week of July 16. 

Since many businesses are waiting for Vista to get a Service Pack before they trust it, releasing it side-by-side with Server 2008 means they may seriously think about adopting the whole platform at the same time. It could be a major boost for enterprise Vista adoption rates. 

Vista SP1 will include revisions to the desktop search integration which will allow competing programs to take Vista search's place, improved performance for file copying, improved shut down times, as well as: 

•  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 

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Regards, people
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia