First Vista Service Pack Due Second Half of 2007

HuckleCom tipped us to an article on the Dark Reading site, stating that plans are already in the works for the first Windows Vista service pack. The pack is slated for release sometime in late 2007, and will target security improvements and Quality of Life issues that may spring up between January and the pack's release date. Microsoft is already looking for volunteers to help them test it. According to the email sent to Technology Adoption Program members, in order to get in on the ground floor IT shops will have to 'deploy pre-release builds into production environments and report back on the results.' As the article observes, Microsoft may be asking for a lot from their customers. Candidate releases of XP service packs had extremely deleterious effects when initially rolled out. There is no firm word for when in the year this pack will be released.

Ha ha ha ha

[Junior J. Junior III]

And by "second half of 2007" they mean, fourth quarter 2011. I love MS Project:)

Re:Quick Release?

[Tony Hoyle]

I would hope they fix some of the issues with vista.. although some are just plain UI inconsistencies.

My pet hate being you can't put an icon in the taskbar for network devices any more, so you can't see visually whether you're locked onto wireless or wired (I switch between them a lot when moving around on the laptop). Disabling the wireless has gone from a right click to 3 dialogs and a UAC prompt.

There's also a process that keeps scanning the files on the disk. Not windows search (disabled that, as it runs the HD at 100% when the machine is idle, stopping the powersaving from working) but another process that's part of svchost.exe - picks random files too.. never seen a pattern to it.

There are a few API bugs that are just plain wierd too.. you can code around them but they're subtle enough to break non-obvious stuff.

Re:Quick Release?

[FuzzyMan45]

Regarding the harddrive usage, i've disabled windows defender, auto defragging, windows update and it doesn't seem to make much of a difference either. When you disabled indexing, did you disable _all_ of the directories? There's a modify screen that you can remove like 5 directories. After doing this, it cut the HD usage a great deal but every once in a while it'll spike up and just think to itself for a while... i've never figured it out.

Re:Quick Release?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know that's a knee-jerk reaction, but I think you miss my entire point : I have an old laptop that runs ME because it is not capable of running XP. All I use it for is to type word processing documents, play music, and occasionally jack it into the internet to check email on the road (but rarely use it online). So, should I just throw it out because the laptop isn't capable of running anything better than ME, and I don't have the time to learn to deal with Linux on it since the laptop meets my needs as it stands right now?

If you have a machine that cannot run XP, don't even consider running a modern Linux on it. Seriously. The bloat is pretty bad nowadays. XP is lightweight by comparison. Yes, I'm aware of XFCE, but that still feels behind Win95.

Windows 2003 to XP Conversion Pack

[Shawn is an Asshole]

You could always install the Windows 2003->XP Conversion Pack [windowsxlive.net]. It's supposed to make the 2003 install behave more like XP.

The Vista Transformation Pack [windowsxlive.net] does a decent job (some visual glitches) of making XP look and act like Vista.

Re:Quick Release?

[Vicissidude]

Windows is one of those products that people and businesses will migrate to regardless of horrible reviews, it's just a question of when. Businesses have been burned enough by bleeding edge software that they don't want the first version of any product, even those with great reviews. So, they'll think of migrating when the first update comes out, aka SP1. Presumably, most of the bugs will be worked out by then.

In this case, Microsoft seems to know the psychology of their customers and has taken action to get to that first update ASAP, regardless of whether that's enough time for all the bugs to work out. That means more money for MS, but likely a bad SP1.

Re:Quick Release?

[poolmeister]

"windows defender, auto defragging"

Is this for real?
So instead of fixing Windows' security model, or reworking the flawed NTFS filesystem, they patch 'em up and give the patches catchy names!
Profit!

Re:Well, kudos actually...

[mcrbids]

Apple just upgrades and inmproves their OS at a much faster rate, not a hard thing to do when you dont support legacy hardware going back a decade, nor work with a huge range of gear by people who are like the one night wonders of the IT world.

I have a decade-old iMac (ruby) that runs the very latest version of Macintosh OSX. (10.4) What's that you say? Apple doesn't support legacy hardware?

Well, try getting Vista to run on a Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM on a 10 GB HDD, which is what was state of the art when the Apple iMac came out.

No, I didn't think so. Come back when you have some clue what you're talking about.