Windows Vista SP 1 RTM available for MSDN and Technet subscribers

[Marik]

Although SP1 for Windows Vista was finalised more than a week ago, Microsoft is still tentative about its general release. Only large PC vendors, customers with volume licences and registered beta testers were initially given access to the final version. SP1 is only scheduled to appear for manual download at the download center from about mid March. Original plans were that MSDN and Technet subscribers should also wait until then, but this caused major protests. Microsoft has now yielded to the criticism (“We heard you.”) and has made SP1 available for download on MSDN and Technet (access requires valid account).

Everyone else will have to be more patient – for good reasons, as it seems. Installing SP1 via Windows Update, for example, requires several additional patches Microsoft will distribute via AutoUpdate. In addition, Microsoft concedes that some drivers (or rather their setup programs, which are rerun when installing SP1) currently prevent the installation of SP1. In a test by c’t magazine, the service pack couldn’t be installed because of a network driver, and only booting from the Vista DVD and returning to the latest system recovery backup finally resolved the situation. Microsoft seems to hope that these critical drivers can be identified and updated via Windows Update before the general release of the service pack in April.

Another reason for the delays could be that Microsoft anticipates that while SP1 will fix many flaws it could also introduce a few new ones. This might not be unfounded, as in an initial test by c’t, Norton Antivirus produced a flawed error message and Bitdefender Antivirus could no longer be installed after SP1 was installed – updating from Vista to SP1 while Bitdefender was installed, however, worked fine.

Even though the software giant explicitly pointed out that SP1 is truly finalised and that no further changes will be made, Microsoft is playing it safe for its own and the benefit of other hardware and software vendors by delaying general release: Two more months remain for distributing any necessary patches before the package will be released via AutoUpdate.

View: Original Article

[rb2tfm]

This has been RTM for some time.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/07/AR2008020700108.html
PC World 
Thursday, February 7, 2008; 1:19 AM

Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing yesterday, and officially sent out to reviewers today

BTW it works fine.

[dock98]

sosdd