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Vista SP1 Is Out

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This is now available via Windows Update (it was only 66.9 MB on my machine via Windows Update).
Full file downloads:
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330) 434.5 MB
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone for x64-based Systems (KB936330) 726.5 MB

If you don’t see it in Windows Update by days end, see:
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is not available for installation from Windows Update and is not offered by Automatic Updates

Updated release notes:
Release Notes for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (v3.2, 3/18/2008)

Also see the Windows Vista Team Blog post:
Windows Vista SP1 Released to Windows Update

eWEEK Survey: Vista? Gimme XP

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Interesting survey results by eWeek Microsoft Watch. Some selected quotes:

…The XP ecosystem is developed and holds back Vista adoption, with some businesses actually going back to XP from its successor. Many respondents wrote in the survey that their main reason for adopting Vista would be Microsoft’s ending XP support…
…Thirty-seven percent of all businesses—48 percent for those with 10-999 employees—do not plan to “implement” Windows Vista within two years. Thirty-four percent—40 percent for businesses with 1,000 or more employees—are unsure…
…Mac OS X is doing surprising well as primary operating system among businesses between 10 and 99 employees—15 percent!…
…The main driver for Vista adoption isn’t some newfangled feature but that the operating system comes preinstalled on the hardware (34 percent of respondents)…

TCP/IP Registry Values for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

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A must-have for all Geeks!
TCP/IP Registry Values for Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008

This white paper describes the registry values for the TCP/IP protocol stack in Microsoft® Windows Vista™ and Windows Server® 2008. The intended audience for this paper is network engineers and support professionals who are already familiar with TCP/IP (both IP version 4 [IPv4] and IP version 6 [IPv6]).

More Vista Benchmark "news"

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The Vista SP1 benchmarking silliness keeps getting, well, sillier…
MS commissioned a company to run and report on: Responsiveness of Windows Vista, Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP on common home / office tasks
Immediately it was picked up by several places as news.

The results are in — XP trumps Vista in benchmark tests
How embarassing — Microsoft commissions tests that compare Vista and XP, with the goal no doubt being to show how much better the new version is. Except that’s not what the test results prove.
Principled Technologies Inc., which performed the tests on the vendor’s behalf, showed Vista SP1 actually lagged XP on about 46 per cent of the business-oriented operations it measured. (The gap was 61 per cent on the consumer-oriented tests, but that’s not primarily what we’re concerned with here.)

Microsoft: Windows XP faster than Vista SP1 in some cases Windows XP is faster than the new Windows Vista Service Pack 1 in completing common consumer and business tasks on PCs coming out of sleep mode, according to tests commissioned by Microsoft Corp.

Report: Vista on par with XP performance; SP1 is fasterIn any event, if you download the above linked reports (the first two are new while the next two are from last year), you’ll discover, surprise surprise, that “overall, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP performed comparably on most test operations [but] Windows Vista SP1 was notably more responsive after rebooting than Windows XP on several common home operations.” This was true for both common home and business tasks.
Gentlemen, start your complaining.

First you’ll notice the articles seem to have completely different spins on the same info. (XP faster, XP a little faster, XP not faster)
Second, this study was PAYED FOR BY MICROSOFT.

🙄

Comments anyone???

Why SP1 was offered to some via Windows Update yesterday

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Today, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC. For general availability, we are still planning to make SP1 broadly available in the mid-March timeframe.

Article
Man, the Vista SP1 release has turned into one giant Charlie Foxtrot.