Windows Vista SP1 to Ship This Week

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

I actually wrote about this in early March, as a footnote to a story about the price drops seen after Microsoft announced its post-SP1 release pricing structure. At that time Amazon was taking pre-orders for Windows Vista with SP1 included, and the announced availability date, as you can see, was - and still is - March 19th.

So unless something drastic happens (and at this point, it’s not) the retail version, which will be free of the “driver issues” Microsoft spoke of when it first released SP1 to manufacturing (RTM), will ship on Wednesday.

At the same time, reports are that the update will appear via Windows Update starting Tuesday.

The driver issues Microsoft warned about mean that some users with Vista already installed won’t see the update via Windows Update until the drivers on their systems are updated - also via Windows Update.

It hasn’t been a smooth process since Vista SP1 RTM, with prerequisite patches causing endless reboots, accidental releases of SP1 (the 64-bit version, anyway), and information about several apps that are broken by SP1.

We Say: if you’re installing from scratch, you’re probably safe. If you’re updating a system, either back up it completely with a disk imaging utility - or wait a few days to see what the fallout is over the update.

This big an update I wouldn’t be an early adopter of, without precautions.