Windows Vista SP1 Releases to Manufacturing — Now for Another Six Week Wait

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

Today Microsoft announced that Windows Vista SP1 has released to manufacturing (RTM). Don’t get excited. It hasn’t released to end users, nor have any DVDs been manufactured yet.

In fact, although on the Windows Vista Blog they note the release, they also list some worrisome facts and the steps the RTM release must go through to reach end users. Also, the first “wave” of SP1 releases is for English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese only.

• Of course, OEMs will get their hot little hands on SP1 and start building systems with it.

• Microsoft will start manufacturing retail DVDs with a TBD date for reaching retail.

• Microsoft will also start manufacturing DVDs for enterprise customers with volume licensing agreements.

What about end users?

Here’s the “worrisome” part of the blog post. Naturally it centers around the big gotcha for Vista: driver support.

Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers. These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices. Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers. While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.

While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers. To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers. As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don’t have any of the affected device drivers installed. We’re taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible.

Interesting. Driver problems again. Heavy sigh. Here’s the timing for the end user. Get ready for a frustrating six week wait:

• In mid-March, they’ll will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the Download Center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. However, the Download Center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to download and install anyway, for those who still choose to install.

• In mid-April, they will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers with Windows Update set for automatic updates. Any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically. According to Microsoft, these systems will be unblocked by driver updates automatically applied by Windows Update. According to Microsoft, “the result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.”

• The remaining languages will RTM in April.

My question, in reference to the automatic updating above, is what about users who choose to not automatically update? I know, I know, Microsoft is constantly pushing for automatic updates, but I personally prefer to update manually after checking what’s available, and also to update drivers from the manufacturer, not Microsoft.

And, expect non-technophile end users to be a) confused and b) frustrated.

Anyway, none of this will happen for six weeks. Start waiting, again.