Terrence Russell
Business

Rumor Control: Vista SP1 Beta Due Next Week

If you haven’t heard, the trend for this week is to promise short and deliver long. Sony was first at bat with the announcement of the PS3 dropping in price, and now there are reports that Microsoft will be launching its oft-forsaken SP1 beta as early as next week. With rumors of an official release […]

Rumors
If you haven't heard, the trend for this week is to promise short and deliver long. Sony was first at bat with the announcement of the PS3 dropping in price, and now there are reports that Microsoft will be launching its oft-forsaken SP1 beta as early as next week. With rumors of an official release date as early as November, this would put SP1 on track to go live side-by-side with Windows Server 2008.

This comes as interesting news as Microsoft's recent tete-a-tetewith Google and the U.S. Department of Justice seemed to imply that any SP1 progress would be a long time coming. I guess this just shows that you can't always trust the hand that feeds you. Microsoft's PR has yet to get back to me as of this posting, but I'll make sure to keep you updated if anything comes down the wire. Until then, make sure to check out the All about Microsoft and AeroXperience lists of likely SP1 features below.

From All about Microsoft:

* Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines
* Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
* Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
* Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
* The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
* Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

From AeroXperience:

  • Windows Installer 4.1
  • Windows Recovery Environment driver loading enhancements
  • DHCP NAP fixes/improvements
  • .NET Framework 3.0 SP1
  • Terminal Services Easy Print client support
  • 64-bit OLEDB Provider for ODBC
  • Additional Cryptography API functionalities (block cipher modes BCRYPT_CHAIN_MODE_CCM, BCRYPT_CHAIN_MODE_GCM)
  • Additional IIS7 Microsoft.Web.Administration API enhancements (i.e. accessing configSection during automated setup)
  • Various API modifications/additions