From the WindowsVistaBlog Mike Nash from the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft announced that Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese).
Here's the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:
- In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
- In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically. That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically. As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1. The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
- The remaining languages will RTM in April.
New customers should feel great about buying Windows Vista today, knowing that when everything is ready, SP1 will be available to them via Windows Update. In the meantime, remember that you can take advantage of the benefits of Windows Vista (including many improvements delivered via Windows Update) even without Service Pack 1.
This is an important milestone for our current and future Windows Vista customers around the world. I want to take a minute to thank our customers for their feedback on Windows Vista and the beta of Service Pack 1. I also want to thank our hardware and software partners for their continued efforts to deliver the best experiences on Windows Vista.
You can read the entire post by going here.
To read about all the notable changes in Vista SP1 head to this article on Technet.
For a complete list of the hotfixes and updates they can be found in Hotfixes and Security Updates included in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 article on Technet. (There are a lot of them!)