Wednesday’s beta release of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista boasted more than 300 bug fixes for Microsoft’s troubled OS but will offer modest performance improvements and no compatibility improvements. A final version will be released to the public in early 2008.
The size of the service pack is something of a surprise because Microsoft had said in March that the updates would be minor. Vista was “high quality right out of the gate,” vice president Michael Sievert said.
“From the sheer size of SP1, some people might look askance, especially since Microsoft insisted a major SP1 was not on the Vista line,” said Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT. Still, he said, SP1 will be welcomed by those consumers and businesses already running Vista but won’t encourage many to speed up their switch-over.
Feeling Good About SP1
“The conventional wisdom for most businesses is to wait until the first service pack for any purchase, except customized software,” King said in a telephone interview. “There are some things to feel pretty good about here.” The fact that Microsoft changed its plans on SP1 shows that the company is “moving aggressively” and realizes “there are issues around Vista,” King said.
Major improvements in SP1 include boosting file copy speed by 25 percent, fixing battery consumption issues which King said were “really irritating” to users who had fully switched over to laptops, and ironing out certain network-performance issues.
The release does not impact compatibility issues in Vista, Microsoft said. “Applications that have compatibility issues with Windows Vista today will most likely continue to have the same issues with Windows Vista with SP1,” Microsoft said in a white paper. “Microsoft recommends that all enterprise customers begin testing their applications on the currently available version of Windows Vista,” the company said.
Pushing Vista Past 2008
Although large businesses deploying custom…