It's no longer a secret that the development of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is well under way. So much so that Microsoft made available a testing version of the first service pack for Vista to a select pool of testers. However, the remaining users of the operating system should not wait for a public version of Vista SP1 beta anytime in the immediate future. While the first beta for Vista SP1 was shipped to testers, the Redmond company only confirmed that a public release will follow by the end of 2007. The images at the bottom, courtesy of WinBeta, apparently come from the Vista SP1 beta editions delivered in mid July.

The first screenshot of Windows Vista SP1 dates back all the way to the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles in May. At that time "Windows Build 6001 Service Pack 1, v113" offered proof that Microsoft was dogfooding the service pack and that the company was moving Vista to the Windows Server 2008, formerly code-named Longhorn, kernel. If you take a look at the images included in here, which I am sure you will, you will be able to observe that in the meantime Vista SP1 has evolved to version 165.

According to the information that can be extracted from the screenshots, Vista SP1 is now at build 6001.16549. In the About Windows image for example the version of the operating system is 6.0, however, the build is 6001 and Service pack 1 is reverenced with v.165. Additional information about the first beta builds of Vista SP1 reveal the fact that Microsoft is not releasing the refresh as an update but as an ISO image. In July Microsoft served SP1 ISO files weighing in at 3.07GB for Vista 32-bit edition and 4.3GB for Vista 64-Bit edition. Vista SP1 beta was delivered in both 6,000 RTM and 6,001 Windows Server 2008 kernel versions.