by Chloe Albanesius
In the wake of its much publicized bid for Yahoo, Microsoft on Monday released the first service pack (SP1) for Windows Vista to manufacturing, with a retail version expected in the coming months.
Vista made its consumer debut in January 2007, and SP1 marks the first major upgrade to the operating system. Microsoft released details about Vista SP1 in August, and opened it to a moderately-sized audience for testing in the weeks thereafter.
Microsoft promised up to 50 percent faster speeds when moving files around on PCs or home networks with SP1. Resuming a Vista computer from sleep mode will also be faster with the upgrade, Mike Nash from Microsoft's Windows product management group wrote in a blog post.
SP1 was released to manufacturers on Monday in five languages: English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. OEM partners will start producing Windows Vista computers with SP1 pre-installed in the next several months, Nash wrote.
Current Vista users will receive the SP1 update when Microsoft rolls out those updated PCs, Nash added. The main reason for the simultaneous rollout was due to a driver problem Microsoft uncovered during the testing phase, he said.
"Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers," Nash wrote. "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."
Microsoft will release SP1 to Windows Update and the Microsoft.com download center in mid-March, Nash said.
If "Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1," Nash wrote. "Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so."
In mid-April, Microsoft will release SP1 to Vista customers with have opted to have updates downloaded automatically to their computers. If a user has one of the problematic drivers, however, they will be updated on a more gradual basis as driver updates become available, he said.
Remaining languages, meanwhile, will be released to manufacturing in April, Nash wrote.
User feedback has been key in crafting SP1, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said during a Monday meeting with financial analysts.
It has enabled the company to be "smarter about this service pack than any other service pack we've done," Ballmer said. "We can now ring the first service pack bell."
The Monday meeting with Ballmer and chief financial officer Chris Liddell was intended primarily to discuss the Yahoo bid, but Ballmer also highlighted upcoming Microsoft projects, including a possible consumer version of its Surface coffee-table PC product.
"We launched our Surface technology this year and told everyone we were only going to bring it to market for commercial customers. Folks like casinos could put it in as high-end entertainment devices," Ballmer said. "But we've had more pushback to get a consumer version of Surface than we can shake a stick at," so Microsoft will look into that in the near future.
The company will also push its own applications for Windows Mobile, which it will "bring to market in the next 12 months," Ballmer said.
Ballmer also promised an increased Windows marketing campaign. He stopped short of promising an all-out "anti-Apple campaign" but said Microsoft will be "doing more to market Windows, [which will] require a market investment."
