Vista SP1 Beta Predicted for Mid-July

Mary Jo Foley has reported that her unnamed sources have indicated that Microsoft is expected to release the first Beta for SP1 (Service Pack 1) for Windows Vista the week of July 16, with the anticipated final version in November, 2007.

With so many people holding off purchase of Windows Vista until after the Service Pack, a November release would be just in time for the Holiday shopping frenzy.

The rumored inclusions, according to Mary Jo, are

• Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines

• Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)

• Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices

• Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes

• The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine

• Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

If Mary Jo's sources are correct, we should be finding out in another week what to expect in Windows Vista SP1.

See Vista SP1 beta 1 to launch in mid-July

Edit to add:

• It appears that we will be seeing fine-tuning elsewhere with SP1. For example, from Mark Russinovich's blog post today, The Case of the Unexpected PsList Error, regarding providing read access to to PerfLib permissions for standard users will be included in SP1:
  

  "To make a long story short, I filed a bug against Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 to have Interactive Users added back to PerfLib’s permissions. The reliability and diagnostics team reported back that the permissions changed inadvertently during the release of Windows Server 2003, but I convinced them it didn’t make sense, so in SP1 and Windows Server 2008 you won’t need to edit PerfLib’s permissions to be able to run tools like PsList as a standard user.
  

  Another case closed by Process Monitor!"
  

  PsList is a utility in SysInternals which can be used to obtain detailed information about a process.

• Also of interest is Long Zheng's report based on a tip from Josh Phillips of Windows Connected that Vista SP1 will fix critical ReadyBoost performance bug.

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