Windows 7 SP1 Beta Notable Changes, but No New Features

While there are no new features in Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1), there are indeed a variety of changes that the upgrade brings to the table. Microsoft has made a resource available on its Download Center, detailing the most important modifications that Windows 7 will support, following the implementation of SP1. I included the list of notable changes in Windows 7 SP1 Beta, as provided by Microsoft below.

Some of you might already have come across the documentation accompanying the first Beta for Windows 7 SP1. Of course, there are the select testers participating in the closed Beta program for the upgrade which received the Notable Changes in Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Beta) document as early as June 2010, if not even earlier. But once the documentation made its way out of Redmond, it also got leaked into the wild, and has been available for download from a variety of sources, provided that users knew where to look for.

For those who didn’t, the software giant is now offering the real thing. The official Notable Changes in Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 (Beta) can be grabbed from the Microsoft Download Center. Following the release of the Windows 7 SP1 Beta, I told you that you could download the Documentation for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Beta (KB976932), including the Notable changes documentation.

Here are Microsoft’s “Changes specific to Windows 7:

Additional support for communication with third-party federation services

Additional support has been added to allow Windows 7 clients to effectively communicate with third-party identity federation services (those supporting the WS-Federation passive profile protocol). This change enhances platform interoperability, and improves the ability to communicate identity and authentication information between organizations.

Improved HDMI audio device performance

A small percentage of users have reported issues in which the connection between computers running Windows 7 and HDMI audio devices can be lost after system reboots. Updates have been incorporated into SP1 to ensure that connections between Windows 7 computers and HDMI audio devices are consistently maintained.

Corrected behavior when printing mixed-orientation XPS documents

Prior to the release of SP1, some customers have reported difficulty when printing mixed-orientation XPS documents (documents containing pages in both portrait and landscape orientation) using the XPS Viewer, resulting in all pages being printed entirely in either portrait or landscape mode. This issue has been addressed in SP1, allowing users to correctly print mixed-orientation documents using the XPS Viewer.

Changes common to both client and server platforms

Change to behavior of “Restore previous folders at logon” functionality SP1 changes the behavior of the “Restore previous folders at logon” function available in the Folder Options Explorer dialog. Prior to SP1, previous folders would be restored in a cascaded position based on the location of the most recently active folder. That behavior changes in SP1 so that all folders are restored to their previous positions.

Enhanced support for additional identities in RRAS and IPsec

Support for additional identification types has been added to the Identification field in the IKEv2 authentication protocol. This allows for a variety of additional forms of identification (such as E-mail ID or Certificate Subject) to be used when performing authentication using the IKEv2 protocol.

Support for Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX)