I know that Al has had his fair share of frustration with Windows Vista (so did Marc at the recent CES event), but I suppose it was just the operating system being pushed out to the market rather prematurely, and hence required a fair bit of time to adjust to its environment, and we, it. After a fair number of months, Microsoft has made an important announcement for the Vista operating system – the Redmond giant aims to release Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows Vista to manufacturing soon, and users of this rather buggy platform will soon be able to get their grubby hands on it in five different languages – English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. This SP1 will be made available as a download from the middle of next month onwards, just in time for the release of new systems that come pre-installed with Vista SP1.

So far, the beta testing of Vista SP1 has successfully weeded out device drivers that were improperly designed and will most likely cough up more hassle with SP1. Since Microsoft cannot make sure that all peripherals (as well as future ones) are compatible with SP1, this means that SP1 can be downloaded via Windows Update come March. There is no further information on who is the brain behind the drives, but according to Microsoft, they are doing all they can with a portion of their hardware partners in order to make sure that everything else moves smoothly. I guess if you really want to be sure, all you need to do is pick up a peripheral or device that comes with the “Windows Vista Capable” sticker.

If you have yet to migrate to Vista and are still rocking on with Windows XP like yours truly, will the imminent arrival of SP1 be enough for you to make the leap of faith?

Source: Ars Technica