Microsoft downplayed the importance of this service pack because they didn’t want organizations to wait for it. Microsoft’s official stance is that service packs are not important anymore since we have now Windows Update, anyway. Well, I counted 390 hotfixes that were not publicly available before. All in all, SP1 contains 479 patches. So the majority of hotfixes are new! There are also 109 new features included, but some of them have been released before. Microsoft is not specific about which of them are new.

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Major news sites (ActiveWin, Bink.nu, WinBeta) are spreading new rumors about the release date of Windows XP SP3 and Vista SP1. According to a French site, XP SP3 is supposed to be released on March 24 and Vista SP1 on Feb. 18. The latter is obviously false or outdated information. I have no clue if the one about XP SP3 is correct.

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I don’t know if you are aware about the InfoWorld campaign to save Windows XP. They have a nice countdown timer on their site. As I post this article, XP has 144 days left.

That is, after June 30 Microsoft plans to end sales of Windows XP to OEM partners. Meanwhile, more than 75,000 signed the petition, but according to a PCWorld article, Microsoft is showing no signs of mercy for XP lovers.

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I am somewhat surprised that Windows Server 2008 RTM came out before Vista SP1. You might have read my rant against “Windows Vista SP1 RTM”, yesterday. In my view, Vista SP1 wasn’t “released” yet. I read on several sites that Server 2008 is avaiable for MSDN and Technet subscribers. I just logged on with our account, but I only found the release candidate on MSDN and on Microsoft’s sites for Volume Licensing customers it didn’t show up at all.

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Mike Nash announced that Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing today. It is quite disappointing that SP1 will be available for download only in mid-March. I find this a bit strange, to say the least of it. Sometimes it seems to me that Microsoft still lives in a time before the Internet.

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Microsoft published new release notes about the release candidate of Service Pack 1 for Vista. They are mostly about bugs and workarounds. The PCwizKid blog claims to have information that SP1 will be released on Feb. 4.

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