After months of speculation, rumor, and silence from Microsoft, the company is finally talking publicly about Service Pack 1 for Vista. Microsoft's Pete McKiernan, a senior product manager for Windows, told News.com that one of the purposes of a service pack is to include all the patches that have been released in one package.
This means that unlike Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista SP1 won't include any "must have" new things or other features to encourage people to move to Vista.
What is included in the "upgrade"?
Security enhancements: There is nothing here that the desktop consumer will notice: Microsoft will provide more opportunities for third-party security vendors to communicate their product status with the Windows Security Center.
Reliability enhancements: Microsoft has been analyzing crashes of Windows Vista reported by users and will be making improvements. In particular, more compatibility with newer graphics cards and printers; greater reliability with extended displays on a laptop, various networking scenarios, in systems that were upgraded from Windows XP, and when Windows Vista enters sleep or resumes from sleep.
Performance enhancements: Microsoft says SP1 will offer performance boosts including the speed to copy and extract files, time to become active from Hibernate and Resume, CPU utilization within Internet Explorer 7 and CPU utilization in laptops, thereby reducing battery drain, and shortening the time when browsing network shares.
None of these is a compelling reason to wait for Windows Vista SP1. Users who have automatic updates turned on will have a significantly shorter time when upgrading to Windows Vista SP1 than users who don't have it turned on or are planning to upgrade or purchase Windows Vista when SP1 becomes available.
