Microsoft is gearing up for the next stage in the delivery of its first service pack for Windows Vista. The Redmond company has confirmed officially that the automatic distribution of Vista SP1 is just around the corner. Still, at this point in time, the deadline for the debut of Vista SP1's serving through Automatic Updates has not been made public. Microsoft has stated all along that it plans to start the distribution of Vista SP1 through AU by mid-April, but offered no additional information to pinpoint the release.

Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, concomitantly with the gold version of Windows Server 2008. Only on March 18 did Microsoft manage to make the service pack available to end users via Windows Update and the Download Center. At that time, the Redmond company only released the English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese language versions of Vista SP1.

As of April 15, Vista SP1 in the remaining 31 languages was also released to manufacturing and put up for grabs. And yet, the availability saga of Vista SP1 RTM is not over yet. The initial five languages of the service pack will start being served to all Vista RTM users that have the Automatic Updates option enabled. The remaining 31 languages supported by Vista will not be receiving Service Pack 1 through AU at this point in time. And in this context, Microsoft has yet to wrap up the delivery of Vista SP1 to an estimated 130 to 150 million copies of Vista RTM on the market.

"We are excited about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and the benefits it provides. We made all 36 languages of SP1 available on Windows Update earlier this week, and we're planning to begin automatic distribution of SP1 in English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese shortly," a member of the Microsoft Update team revealed.

Windows Vista Service Pack 1 All Language Standalone CD ISO is available for download here.
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 All Language Standalone DVD ISO is available for download here.
The Windows Vista Service Pack 1 All Language Standalone packages are here.