There are legitimate reasons why Microsoft is advising customers that the best way to upgrade Windows 7 to Service Pack 1 is by turning to Windows Update, and not by leveraging the standalone downloads of SP1.
One illustrative example is related to the amount of disk space that needs to be available in order for the deployment of SP1 RTM to work without any issues.
In fact, as a general rule, customers need to make sure that they have sufficient space available on the HDD where Windows 7 is installed in order to integrate the upgrade.
In this context, grabbing Windows 7 SP1 RTM through Windows Update requires considerably less free disk space than any other deployment scenarios.
For the installation of SP1 RTM on top of x86-based (32-bit) Windows 7, users need to have at least 750 MB of free disk space.
Obviously, a little more is required for x64-based (64-bit) Windows 7 SP1 RTM, namely no less than 1050 MB.
But these numbers are only a fraction of the those associated with manual deployments, according to information supplied by the Redmond company.
Getting SP1 RTM from the Microsoft Download Center and installing it requires at least 4100 MB of free disk space for the x86-based (32-bit) version of the service pack, and as much as 7400 MB for the x64-based (64-bit) flavor.
Just as much free disk space is also required for having Windows 7 SP1 RTM deployed from a DVD.
With Windows 7 SP1 RTM downloads live on the Download Center as of February 22nd, Microsoft also started serving the upgrade to Windows Update.
I just checked the updates that the copy of Windows 7 I’m using now downloaded and sure enough, SP1 RTM is ready to be installed. I’ll fire up the upgrade process later today, and let you know how things go.
Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM Build 7601.17514.101119-1850 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) RTM are available for download here.
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