14 DAY TRIAL // This is it, the moment in excess of 60 million Vista users have been waiting for is here. The first fully-fledged Beta version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is live and available for download. At the end of august, Nick White, Product Manager on the Vista launch team, and Jon DeVaan, senior vice president of the Windows Core Operating System division, revealed that the first Beta of Vista SP1 was planned a few weeks into September 2007. And although there was a lot of anticipation building around a potential mid September release date, Microsoft took its due time and only made Vista SP1 Beta available starting yesterday, September 24, 2007.
Also, the company settled for a number of Vista SP1 Beta testers between the initially reported figures of 10,000 and 15,000 MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Approximately 12,000 preselected testers now have access to Vista SP1 Beta. Both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the first refresh for Vista have been made available for download. Vista SP1 Beta participants will be able to get their hands on the new build of the service pack via connect.microsoft.com. 12,000 testers certainly represent an expansion of the original very select, very hush-hush pool of participants in the early test driving of pre-beta versions of the first service pack for Vista. Still, Microsoft is yet a long way away from making available a public Beta of Vista SP1.
Microsoft failed to fully confirm this, but Vista users can expect public access to Service Pack 1, later this year, concomitantly with the availability of the release candidate version of the refresh. In this context, the Redmond company is trying to make sure that the SP1 goes through all the beta stages, and release a public version only when the quality standard will recommend the product for RC phase. This does not mean however that Microsoft is permitting Vista SP1 testers to run wild and free with the first Beta. In fact, all 12,000 Vista SP1 Beta participants have had to agree to non-disclosure agreements.
The first Service Pack for Windows Vista is nothing more than a standard release bringing a range of enhancements across the operating system, but no new features. The final release of Vista SP1 is planned for the first quarter of 2008, with all indications pointing to after February of next year. Testers of Vista SP1 Beta should know that the release has a few issues with the User Account Control. The SP1 Beta build is a standalone installer and should be run with full administrative privileges in order to avoid problems and also to speed up the installation process. The deployment of Vista SP1 Beta will take between 30 minutes and one hour.