Windows Vista SP1 - Fix or Folly?
Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is finally being released to system builders a little more than a year after the operating system was released to the general public on January 31, 2007. Despite the longest development cycle of any Windows product Vista came to market with an intolerable level of issues. Major vendors persuaded Microsoft to issue a reversion disk to allow business customers to revert to Windows XP from Vista.
Compatibility issues for most major vendors have been overcome in Windows regular updates. But many specialty application vendors are still recommending that you stay with Windows XP. If you are contemplating Windows Vista at this time you will want to check with your applications vendors first.
Microsoft's Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta White Paper breaks SP1's updates into three catagories:
- Quality improvements, including all previously released updates, which address reliability, security, and performance.
- Improvements to the administration experience, including BitLockerTM Drive Encryption (BDE).
- Support for emerging hardware and standards, such as an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and an Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT).
The first area includes system crashes and application lockups. These items initiate service calls there's little remedy for other than the temporary fix of rebooting. As such we've encouraged customers to hold off on Windows Vista until we get a chance to get user feed back on implementation of SP1 which is due to be released to the general public in mid March.
If the glamor features such as the Aero Glass user interface doesn't persuade you to migrate to Vista now items in the third category eventually will. New standards and devices will no longer be added to XP. To take advantage of them will require Vista. If it suits your plans wait until you check with specialty vendors and assess user feedback from SP1.
