Microsoft on Tuesday said that it has reached the “release candidate” with the first service pack for Windows Vista, with plans to make the test software available publicly next week. It is releasing the test code this week to the 15,000 or so people who have been beta testing SP1 already, and will also make it available on Thursday to those in the MSDN and TechNet developer programs. “We feel really good and we look forward to receiving feedback from our larger set of testers,” said David Zipkin, a senior product manager on the windows Client team. Microsoft also said on its Vista blog on Wednesday that it will make available a “blocker” that will allow customers who have Vista and use Windows Update to block SP1 upon its final release to allow for further testing. Microsoft offered a similar option with Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Service Pack 1 is mainly designed as a collection of bug fixes and performance improvements rather than an attempt to add new features. Among the changes that are more feature-related is the ability to use BitLocker encryption on multiple hard drive volumes as well as changes to the desktop search feature, which were made to satisfy antitrust concerns from Google. The software maker has made some changes to SP1 since it began testing it earlier this year. In particular, the company has worked to reduce the size of the update as well as the amount of free space required to perform the update. Vista still requires up to 4.5GB of free space for a typical user, but that’s down from the 7GB required in earlier beta versions. Most of that space is returned back to the user. For some people, though, particularly those with ultramobile machines or running Vista in a partition on their Mac, the free space limit can be an obstacle. I guess there were really MANY bugs when this update takes gigabytes of space…
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