So it’s been about a year, and still no windows vista service pack. Sure, there’s a beta, but who really wants to mess with that? You could end up worse off than your current Vista install.

I’ve heard from the rumor mill that a lot of what is in the current beta doesn’t address one of the bigger problems with the current build of Windows Vista, like problems getting Windows XP and Windows Vista machines to network together, though they do list “Improved Windows Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios”, but who knows exactly what that means.

One of the bigger fixes from what I’ve seen will be the updated driver support, and updated hardware support, so all of you early adopters that had problems with Vista not being able to detect your cd burners and video cards might have some luck now. But the big question will be, will people try it again, or will they stick with Windows XP and wait patiently for Windows XP Service Pack 3 to come out?

There are a host of reliability and performance fixes listed as well, like less CPU utilization in IE7, better performance accessing network shares, better battery life on some laptop hardware, etc.

I think overall they’re stepping in the right direction. Their list of supported hardware almost doubled from November last year to July this year, supported software has increased almost ten fold since launch.

I just wish they would hurry up and finish it already.. but it’s Microsoft, so I guess people are used to the “hurry up and wait” mentality. Too bad I’m not.

If you want more info about Windows Vista Service Pack 1, check out this Windows Vista Blog post.