Windows Vista SP1: Ready, but not available yet?

Microsoft yesterday announced that Vista Service Pack 1 was RTM’ed (Release to Manufacturing), but there it will not be available until mid-March.

The release of Vista Service Pack 1 coincides with the release of Windows Server 2008, which as it happens, shares 95% of the same code base with Vista.

Dissapointing Vista sales figures in 2007 indicated that there would be a late 2007 release date for Vista’s first Service Pack. Vista SP1 will resolve many of the common issues reported by customers during Vista’s public first year, including security, performance and API improvements as well as the usual par-for-course plethora of slipstreamed and updated drivers to support third party hardware.  Microsoft will be hopeful that the large corporations who normally wait until the first service pack before considering putting a new operating system into production will now consider a migration to Windows Vista SP1. A further interesting change is in response to anti-competitive charges made at Microsoft from Google to improve access to the operating system for search.  The latest code changes made up to the end of December required regression testing through January and after a substantial beta test period, the Service Pack is now finished.

It may be a Microsoft first, the release of a product that we won’t be able to get hold of for a least a month, but Microsoft’s plan is to release Service Pack 1 for download in mid-March and then to follow it up in April with a push out to all customers via Automatic Update.

With the substantial improvements in performance and reliability; it’s a shame that we don’t have the RTM Service Pack available to us all yet. It is not clear what Microsoft are waiting for. In the meantime, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the news and I’ll let you know when Service Pack 1 is available!

Vista SP1 RC is now available for public testing

Microsoft has recently released the previously closed trial Vista SP1 Release Candidate 1 as a publicly available "Refresh" trial, which you can download from here.

This service pack is a collection of all the cumulative bug fixes and product enhancements to date and SP1 for Vista represents substantial progress in the reliability and performance of Vista machines and should signal an uptake in the adoption rates for Vista across the business market.

Whilst we usually recommend waiting for the official releases of hotfixes and service packs; if you are in a position facing low performance or reliability, the service pack is available now should you wish to test.

The Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh is time limited to June 30th 2008, although you can uninstall it and install the Vista SP1 release when it becomes available later this quarter.

I suspect that people will either stay on Windows XP SP3 or now move to Vista SP1 with a few consumers moving to Mac OS and businesses waiting for Vista SP1. Looking back in time, I remember troubles with Windows XP - an operating system which only came into demand a year or so after its release and was only taken up en-mass with the release of XP’s SP1.

For me, I’m rather hoping that Microsoft will finally see sense and get around to slipstreaming common SATA drivers onto the Windows Vista installation DVD ROM images and we can finally leave floppy disk drives to a well deserved retirement!

Come on Microsoft - release Vista SP1, Server 2008 and SQL 2008 already!

Update to Java 6.2 for Windows Vista Aero

Have you ever noticed when browsing using Internet Explorer 7 on Vista, sometimes you’ll come across a site that uses Java applets and before you know it your screen flickers and bang, you’ve been dropped back into Vista Basic mode? Sometimes with an accompanying info message:

It happens to me all the time, and it’s very fustrating. Lots of sites use Java applets and the first thing you’ll know when you come across one is that you lose the glass transulency, Alt-Tab previews, taskbar previews, and Flip3D. Once you’ve finished browsing the site with the java applet that caused this whole mess, Vista doesn’t automatically switch back to Aero. You have to kill IE7 completely - Vista then flickers back to Aero.

The problem was caused by an old version of the Java VM that comes packaged with Vista. The Java VM allows Vista to understand how to run Java applications, and it had some safety code in it which as a side-effect caused Vista to “trip” into the Vista Basic interface every time it was called. You can read more about this on Chet Haase’s blog.

Since Java is owned by Sun Microsystems, updates are not distributed through Windows Update. Java is third party software, so you need to take the upgrading action yourself. Fortunately this is easy enough to do. Head over to http://java.com/en/ and follow the instructions to download and install the Java Standard Edition 6 Update 2 for Windows Vista.

Reboot and the problem is solved

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