Microsoft finally made the announcement when the first - and very important - Service Pack for Windows Vista will be released. The released date for the Service Pack 1 will be in mid march. It will become available through Windows Update first and users with automatic downloads set to on will receive it in April. If you want to get your hands on the Service Pack before you have to manually access Windows Update and download the Service Pack there.
Only five languages will be available when it is released in march, those are English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. All other languages will not be released before April as well. Manufacturers on the other hand are receiving the Service Pack in the coming days to integrate it with computers that ship with Windows Vista.
You might be asking now why Microsoft is not releasing the Service Pack to customers as well right now and delaying the release for another month. That is a very good question. According to Microsoft the
reasons are the following:
There are a couple of reasons for this. Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers. These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices. Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers. While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.
While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers. To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers. As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don't have any of the affected device drivers installed. We're taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible.
This is only one reason and the blog post is not specifying other reasons why Microsoft might be delaying the release of the first Service Pack for Windows Vista. Guess we all have to wait another month to finally download the final version. All beta and test versions have to be uninstalled before the final version can be installed.
Windows Vista SP1 will be released in March 2008
