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It turns out that stability isn’t the only problem Vista SP1 has with the world. There are plenty of products that simply won’t work with Service Pack 1. Now wait a minute, you might ask. This has been going on since every operating system update from the beginning of computers, what makes this one so special? When the products are from big shots like Trend Micro, Zonelabs, BitDefender, and Novell, Microsoft is more than willing to consider delaying Vista SP1 to make sure that everything will work properly. While some products are fortunate, and merely have a couple glitches, the majority of the programs listed on Microsoft’s great list of incompatibility won’t even start properly. The main cause of this could be anything from coding differences in the kernel to being flat out blocked. Hopefully, Microsoft will fix this by the time SP1 is released.

Face it, the Windows XP code is reliable, practical, useful, secure and cost-effective. Most people, especially those in the business sector, simply don’t see the need to upgrade to Windows Vista. It’s no news that Windows XP Service Pack 3 is coming out soon. However, Microsoft may not have considered the effect XP SP3 may have on Vista sales. If a lot of users adopt XP SP3, they may be even less tempted to move on to Windows Vista, which is ultimately what Microsoft would like their customers to do. However, Microsoft may find that XP SP3 doesn’t have any effect on Vista sales at all. After all, those who want Windows Vista will upgrade to Windows Vista, no matter what XP offers. Those who want to stick with XP will stick with XP, and may not even upgrade to the latest service pack.

It seems work on Windows Vista’s first service pack is almost complete, with Microsoft planning to make the Release Candidate (RC) version publicly available next week via Microsoft’s Download Center. Microsoft commented that “the code has attained a significant level of performance and stability” and listed the following changes which have been made since the beta release:

• The size of the standalone installers have decreased significantly. For example, the standalone installer packages consisting of all 36 languages (x86 and x64 chip architectures) are smaller by over 50%. The standalone installer packages consisting of just the 5 languages (again, x86 and x64) slated for initial release are more than 30% smaller in size.
• The required amount of disc space for SP1 installation has also decreased significantly. Furthermore, with the RC, if more space is required to install SP1, an error message will now display exactly how much space is needed to complete the installation.
• Previous SP1 versions left behind a directory of files that wasn’t needed after installation and occupied about 1GB of space; the RC includes automatic disk clean-up to remove this directory.
• Installation reliability has been improved based on bug reports and error codes reported from Windows Update (thanks, Beta testers!). Testing shows that these improvements have significantly increased the proportion of successful installations of the RC.
• We’ve improved the user experience of installing SP1 via Windows Update. During the Beta release, users installed without much guidance from Windows Update. The RC now contains a series of screens with detailed information on SP1.

The final version of Vista SP1 is on target to be released during the first quarter of 2008 – roughly a year after the operating system was publicly launched.
Source: Windows Vista Team Blog