Windows Vista SP1 Is Live

Posted by slapnuts in March 18th, 2008

SP1 has been “pending” for a few months now since it was first released to developers and early testers. Today is the official roll out for consumers via Windows Update and the Microsoft site.

The standalone installer is available here at Microsoft’s site, or you can refresh your Windows Update and it should show up.

The release contains the following enhancements as listed over the MS Technet site:

•	Adds support for new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) industry standard PC firmware for 64-bit systems with functional parity with legacy BIOS firmware, which allows Windows Vista SP1 to install to GPT format disks, boot and resume from hibernate using UEFI firmware.
•	Adds support for x64 EFI network boot.
•	Adds support for the 64-bit version of MSDASQL, which acts as a “bridge” from OLEDB to a variety of ODBC drivers thus simplifying application migration from 32-bit platforms to 64-bit Windows Vista.
•	Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
•	Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
•	Adds support for SD Advanced DMA (ADMA) on compliant SD standard host controllers. This new transfer mechanism, which is expected to be supported in SD controllers soon, will improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization.
•	Adds support for creating a single DVD media that boots on PCs with either BIOS or EFI.
•	Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
•	Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs.
•	Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
•	Enhances Netproj.exe to temporarily resize the desktop to accommodate custom projector resolutions when connecting to Windows Network Projectors.

The update weighs in at 436MB for Vista 32-bit, and 727MB for Vista 64-bit.

I will be downloading this shortly to see what kind of visible improvements come along with the update. Often users tend to shy away from Windows OSes until they reach the SP1 milestone in hopes that most issues are worked out by then. Will this be the answer to speed up Vista adoption?

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