First Vista Service Pack Due Second Half of 2007

HuckleCom tipped us to an article on the Dark Reading site, stating that plans are already in the works for the first Windows Vista service pack. The pack is slated for release sometime in late 2007, and will target security improvements and Quality of Life issues that may spring up between January and the pack's release date. Microsoft is already looking for volunteers to help them test it. According to the email sent to Technology Adoption Program members, in order to get in on the ground floor IT shops will have to 'deploy pre-release builds into production environments and report back on the results.' As the article observes, Microsoft may be asking for a lot from their customers. Candidate releases of XP service packs had extremely deleterious effects when initially rolled out. There is no firm word for when in the year this pack will be released.

Comments

Yeah, right.

[ScrewMaster]

'deploy pre-release builds into production environments and report back on the results.

That would be funny, if it weren't coming from Microsoft.

Re:Yeah, right.

[drinkypoo]

'deploy pre-release builds into production environments and report back on the results.

That would be funny, if it weren't coming from Microsoft.

That would be funny, if that weren't the terms under which we were all already running Windows XP.

There, fixed that for you.

Quick Release?

[Lithdren]

Seems to me they're releasing a Service Pack pretty quick for an OS.

"I think i'll wait till they relase SP1 for Vista before I upgrade"

better wait for SP2!

Re:Quick Release?

[Vicissidude]

Seems to me they're releasing a Service Pack pretty quick for an OS. "I think i'll wait till they relase SP1 for Vista before I upgrade" better wait for SP2!

The fact that everyone waits for SP1 is the exact reason why they're releasing that first service pack so quickly.

Re:Quick Release?

[Lithdren]

Excatly my point.

How much could they possibly fix this quick in an OS as monolithic as Vista? not much is my guess. Its more of a combover for people who dont want to get burned like they did with XP when it first released.

Its XP that really made people realize how horribly buggy software could be on release. How many corporate offices wont upgrade software to something untill after a particular period of proven reliabilty on the market now? My guess is quite a bit more since XP.

And how many of those set the requiremnt to be after X number of major upgrades? A Service Pack would qualify to most people as fairly major.

Re:Quick Release?

[VertigoAce]

Actually, there's a very simple reason for Microsoft to release a service pack in the second half of 2007. That happens to be the exact same phrase used to describe the release of Longhorn server. In case you didn't know, Longhorn client (Vista) and Longhorn server are built from the same codebase. Vista SP1 is primarily the result of an extra year of development to the common OS components, plus any client patches that didn't make it in time for RTM.

The point is that most of the work will have been done for the server release already. They may as well package up a new build of the client since it will inherit any improvements from the server.

WinXP

[Archangel Michael]

I'm more interested in the next WinXP SP, as there are currently some 80 patches needed after a clean install of XP SP2. Yeah, I know all about all the goodies that help streamline installing them, but they are only patches to something Microsoft ought to be doing.

Sweet deal!

[PingSpike]

I can beta test Microsoft's software for them and all I have to do is potentially hose my production servers? Sign me up! Sign me up yesterday!

Vista SP1 (Read: Vista proper release)

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Releasing a service pack so soon after release is basically an admission on Microsoft's part that Vista was rushed out incomplete. All this means is that anyone planning their upgrade schedule should really count the release of SP1 as if it were the initial release of Vista (ie. wait at least 6-12 months on from that point to allow issues to be resolved). Yet another reason not to switch to Vista in the forseeable future.

Re:Vista SP1 (Read: Vista proper release)

[Samalie]

We all KNOW Vista is being rushed out incomplete. The problem really is twofold: that companies (and not just MicroSoft) rush out product before it is ready, requiring patches/etc, but for some unknown reason we all find the multitude of patches/etc acceptable. In some ways, the "dark days" of computing (pre-fast-internet) were the golden years. Either a company released a fully working product, and it thrived, or they released garbage, and the companies died in the process. Of course, there is no way that this process will change until we, the consumers, demand finished products at release. But somehow I dont think the sheeple out there will do that either. No matter how you look at it, the consumer loses now, and the consumers don't seem to care.

Re:Vista SP1 (Read: Vista proper release)

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Well that's one side of the coin. On the other side you've got other products that have been able to continue improving over the years and respond to changes in technology to extend their effective product lifetime - things that would otherwise have been provided as costly upgrades or "new versions" if it weren't for patching. Sometimes patches (and the fundamental expectation that they're free) can actually be a good way to get value for money from a product. Just not in this case.

Re:Vista SP1 (Read: Vista proper release)

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

People are whining that Microsoft promised a major step forward, spent the better part of a decade in development, pushing back the ETA over and over again, and now after all that time they've produced something which has lost virtually all of the features that once made it interesting and somehow they still haven't finished the product properly. So you're asking if people are whining because it took too long or because they rushed it - both. It's far later than originally planned, far smaller in ambition than originally stated, and still unfinished. In other words people are whining because Microsoft haven't made good on any of the promises surrounding Vista (in all its guises) for the last half-dozen years.

I don't think anyone is surprised that they're releasing SP1 so soon. It's just disappointing that it's lived down to expectations.

Ha ha ha ha

[Junior J. Junior III]

And by "second half of 2007" they mean, fourth quarter 2011. I love MS Project:)

vista 2.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

before everyone freaks out about a service pack, how often do new versions of Ubuntu or Fedora come out? Is there that much of a difference just because one OS calls it a service pack and one calls it a version?

Re:Bah

[Ruie]

I hate seeing the words Vista and Security in the same sentence

Nonsense. In security discussions Vista means a particular kind of a very large hole.

Re:Quality of Life and the environment

[praxis]

Really 20%?! My Athalon 64 3200+ is using about 3% CPU for the search indexer background process (not usually indexing depending on how I set my power profiles depending on my current needs, I run it when actively using the machine and plugged into a wall outlet) and not much else. Turning off the search indexer has my task manager toggle between 0% and 2% (when taskmgr updates). Are there occasional spikes when the indexer *is* running and fetches a chunck of data, sure, but that's not idleing at 20%, that's a process processing.

Do they mean "User Experience"?

[SeaFox]

The pack is slated for release sometime in late 2007, and will target security improvements and Quality of Life issues that may spring up between January and the pack's release date.

Quality of Life issues? I mean, I've heard Vista makes you a slave to DRM but I didn't think they meant that in a literal sense.

And this is wrong, why?

[DavidD_CA]

So let me get this straight... Microsoft says they're going to release some patches to an operating system in about 5 or 6 months.

And what's wrong with that?

Would the community rather Microsoft not release any patches at all? Or not start working on them this early? Do you really think Microsoft is just going to give everyone a two-year vacation now that Vista has shipped? How responsible would that be?

Typical Slashdot response though.