On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that its first service pack for its Windows Vista operating system will be released in the final quarter of this year with the company shipping a beta next month to 10,000 to 15,000 testers.
The update, according to cnet, will include operating system updates, bug fixes, and enhancements to improve performance, reliability and application compatibility of Vista.
David Zipkin, senior product manager for Microsoft, stated that while Microsoft has garnered a reputation for sneaking fixes into system updates and that these updates have caused headaches in the past, “anything that works on Vista is going to keep on working on SP1.”
Microsoft has also announced that it will release a third service pack for Windows XP which will include previous service packs as well as a small number of new fixes.
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On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that its first service pack for its Windows Vista operating system will be released in the final quarter of this year with the company shipping a beta next month to 10,000 to 15,000 testers.
The update, according to cnet, will include operating system updates, bug fixes, and enhancements to improve performance, reliability and application compatibility of Vista.
David Zipkin, senior product manager for Microsoft, stated that while Microsoft has garnered a reputation for sneaking fixes into system updates and that these updates have caused headaches in the past, “anything that works on Vista is going to keep on working on SP1.”
Microsoft has also announced that it will release a third service pack for Windows XP which will include previous service packs as well as a small number of new fixes.
The Vista service pack will include the 20 updates that have already been released through Microsoft’s automatic update services as well as new fixes. Zipkin went on record to state that thousands of Vista files will be changed as part of the release.
Even so, users can expect the service pack to be smaller than that which was provided for Windows XP. Users can expect a 50 megabyte download for Vista SP1 as opposed to more than 100 megabytes for XP SP2.
Specific fixes for the Vista SP1 update include features such as allowing the computer to resume functionality after being placed in Hibernate or Standby mode and a reduction to the time between hitting Control/Alt/Delete and that needed to see the log-in prompt to enter Windows. Microsoft has also stated that Vista SP1 will improve the performance of Internet Explorer 7 to speed Javascript processing and reduce CPU utilization for sites running Asynchronous Javascript and XML.
Zipkin also stated that the update will reduce the likelihood of Vista crashing from a vague “search protocol handler” error message that users have complained about.
Microsoft has reported that 60 million licenses for Vista have been sold to consumers and 42 million licenses have been sold to businesses.
The changes should be apparent on the Mac end to users running virtualization programs such as Parallels Desktop for the Mac, VMWare and CrossOver.
If you have any thoughts or feedback on this or your Windows Vista experience in general, let us know in the comments or forums.