Good news for Windows Vista users out there – Microsoft has announced that Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista has gone RTM (that’s short for Released to Manufacturing) with the initial release being available for English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. According to this blog posting by Mike Nash, SP1 focuses on several key areas including:

• Improves reliability and performance
• Copying and moving files on your PC will be much faster – up to 50 % faster in some instances
• Resuming Vista based PC from sleep will be faster on SP1

So when exactly will SP1 be available to everyone? For current Vista users, the rollout of SP1 will be in a staged format which will also be roughly concurrent with the rollout of SP1 on new PCs and in the stores.  The reason for the staged rollout for current customers is due to a driver conflict that Microsoft ran into during SP1 testing. After SP1 was installed, a small number of device drivers had issues which were related to the driver installation process and not the device driver itself (the fix was to reinstall the driver itself). Thus Windows Update will roll out SP1 to systems that do not have the affected drivers. This will give hardware manufacturers some time to update their driver installation process to ensure SP1 will work without a problem. Here’s the reported rollout schedule:

• SP1 will be released to Windows Update and to the download center in the middle of March. While Windows Update may not update your computer due to a driver problem, you can still get SP1 yourself by going to the Download Center at Microsoft’s website
• For those that opted to have updates downloaded automatically, SP1 will be delivered in mid-April.
• The remaining languages will be released to manufacturing in April.

[Check it out]

Technorati Tags: Windows Vista, SP1