SP1 FOR WINDOWS VISTA
01/09/2007
Finally, after months of silence, Microsoft has come up with details about its plans for the first update to Windows Vista. According to Microsoft, the service pack will arrive in the first quarter of the 2008, with a beta of SP1 for Vista coming in the next few weeks to a limited group of 10,000 pre-selected testers.
The Vista update will mostly be a collection of existing fixes and tweaks targeted at increasing the stability and reliability of the system. Says Shanen Boettcher, a general manager in the Windows unit: “Its not a delivery vehicle for lots of features.”
Some of the improvements that can be expected from SP1 for Vista, as highlighted by ZDNet Blogger, Mary Jo Foley:
- Support for Direct 3D 10.1
- Support for Secure Digital (SD) Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA) to improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization
- Performance tweaks pertaining to copying of files, shut down, and resume
- 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
- Improvements to battery life by reducing CPU utilization be “not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain computers”
- Improvements to Internet Explorer 7 performance by reducing CPU utilization and speeding JavaScript parsing
- Bugs, bugs and more bugs