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Microsoft RTMs Vista
SP1
4 February, 2008
By Patricia Pickett
Microsoft Corp. is hoping the release to manufacturing
of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista will encourage
customers to upgrade their existing machines to the operating
system (OS), which up until now has mostly been adopted
through new hardware purchases.
The RTM of SP1, which came out on Monday, is a "significant
milestone for Vista," said Elliot Katz, product manager
for Windows Client with Microsoft Canada Co. in Mississauga,
Ont. It's been just about a year since Vista was made generally
available, and in the past year more than 100 million Vista
licenses have been sold worldwide. "That's a tipping
point," said Katz. "When you get to this kind
of level, organizations start to accelerate deployments
and consumers accelerate purchases of new PCs and upgrades
of existing PCs."
As announced in September, SP1 will include all updates
previously delivered through Windows Update and auto update.
Even if a customer has downloaded all the updates, it's
still worth downloading and installing SP1 because the service
pack provides additional upgrades that can only be done
by making tweaks to the core OS, Katz said.
For example, in the category of emerging standards, SP1
will provide support for new flash memory devices that require
the exFAT file system. On the infrastructure optimization
side, customers will be able to encrypt other hard drive
partitions with Vista's BitLocker technology in addition
to the partition they booted from, which was previously
not possible. Certain performance aspects of Vista will
also improve with SP1, such as the speed at which files
are copied or unzipped, or the speed at which the computer
comes out of sleep mode.
Katz said that in a few weeks, Microsoft will also provide
additional details on another big change being introduced
through SP1: the removal of reduced functionality mode as
an anti-piracy measure, in favour of a somewhat more laid-back
approach that includes notifications.
Although they really didn't need to wait for SP1, some
customers have done so because that's always been their
practice with other OS versions, Katz said. After the release
of previous service packs, Microsoft has "historically
seen increases in adoption rates," and the vendor is
hoping the situation will be no different with Vista.
Microsoft is also hoping SP1 will trigger an increase in
upgrades to Vista on customers' existing systems. In the
past, when a new OS was released, most people would install
it on their existing machines, but since the price of PCs
has dropped so much, many people simply went out and bought
new PCs that happened to have Vista on them.
"I do believe that with SP1, we are going to see an
upsurge in in-place upgrades from XP to Vista," Katz
said. "We think PC sales will continue to be strong,
but we expect an incremental bump (in Vista sales) as people
upgrade their existing PCs....We also expect to see corporate
adoption and deployment increase on new machines."
Over the past year, Microsoft has spent a considerable
amount of time working with hardware manufacturers and independent
software vendors (ISVs) to resolve some compatibility issues.
That's always a challenge when an operating system is first
released, said Katz. "We wish we had done better with
both hardware and application compatibility when Vista first
shipped," he admitted. "But over the course of
the year, we have made great progress."
For example, Microsoft has been able to increase the number
of devices and components supported by Vista from 20,000
when the OS first shipped, to a current 77,000, Katz said.
While the drivers for these additional devices have been
available through Windows Update and the auto update feature,
Katz noted that they will not be included in SP1. In addition,
the number of Vista-logoed devices is now at 17,000. In
comparison, within the same time frame only 12,000 logoed
devices were available for XP, Katz said.
Application improvements have also been made, said Katz.
When Vista first came out, Microsoft was able to identify
which apps weren't working. "Out of the applications
identified, 150 that were determined to be enterprise deployment-blocking"
-- meaning they were significant enough that incompatibility
would hinder Vista adoption -- "have been remediated."
While a few other apps still remain, the bulk of the major
ones have been dealt with, Katz said.
The number of Vista-logoed applications is 10 times what
was available for XP a year after its launch, said Katz,
adding that 98 out of the top 100 selling consumer applications
now run on Vista.
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