Windows Vista logo In case you’ve been under a rock for the last few days, you should know that Microsoft has officially released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista as of yesterday. All you need to do is go to Windows Update and see if your system is eligible for the update. I say eligible because Microsoft will attempt to determine whether there could potentially be any problems in applying SP1 with your system’s device drivers. If you run Windows Update and you don’t see SP1 on the list of new updates, then there could be a couple of factors. According to this posting over at the Windows Vista Team Blog, factors include:

  • You have not yet installed all the prerequisite packages you need for Windows Vista SP1.  To install them, visit the Windows Update control panel and click on “check for updates.”
  • You have a pre-release version of SP1 and need to uninstall it before installing SP1
  • You already have it.  To determine if you already have SP1 installed, Open the Start Menu, right click on Computer and left click on Properties.
  • We released SP1 in these 5 languages:  English, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.  If you have any other language installed, SP1 will not yet be offered to you.  (You might not even know if you have an additional language installed — check the Regional and Language Options control panel to see which languages you have installed.)
  • Back in February we announced that we’d be using Windows Update to help make the update as seamless as possible for our users.  Windows Update will detect drivers that we know may be problematic when updating to SP1 and will not offer the service pack until an update has been installed.

If your system is currently up to date, and you still can’t find SP1, you can always go ahead and download the standalone installer at Microsoft Downloads. I had to do this for my home theater PC last night. It’s a sizable download (weighing over 400+ MB) but it’s pretty straightforward.

I’ve already updated my notebook (Dell Latitude D820) as well my HTPC and I’ve yet to run into any problems thus far. As far as speed is concerned, I can’t say for sure that my system is “faster” than it was before.. but at least it doesn’t feel slower. Unfortunately I didn’t take any benchmarks before and after the install of SP1.

All told - it’s probably a good thing to install SP1 unless you have some strange hardware configuration or if you’ve got unapproved drivers installed on your system.

Here are some articles about SP1 from around the web.

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