I can't help it, but join this speculation game. Several sources have information about the release date of Windows Vista SP1. It seems as if Windows Vista SP1 will be available on February 15.

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Latest posts by Michael Pietroforte (see all)

Digitimes cites a DRAM vendor talking about the Feb. 15 as the launch date of Service Pack 1:

But the PC market will rebound in the second quarter, he said. The launch of an updated version of Microsoft Vista on February 15, if its prices do not go up too much compared to its previous version, may help boost DRAM sales, Pai added.

And InfoWorld mentions the same date. According to their source, software industry analysts also have heard of Feb. 15 as the target date for SP1.

As usual, Microsoft officials did not confirm anything. I've mentioned it before on this blog. I find Microsoft's information policy about release dates quite vexing. Release dates of such importance play a central role in the planning of any bigger IT department. I wonder how many organizations did not even start thinking about deploying Vista simply because the release date of Service Pack 1 is still unknown.

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In my opinion, the exact launch date of a Windows service pack should be publicly known at least three months in advance. I know that it is not easy to determine when exactly a software product is ready. However, I think that it is possible if you only add a generous time allowance to your schedule. If you are done earlier, you can just do some extra testing before releasing the product.

10 Comments
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    Christian Schiffer 16 years ago

    Predicting a release date is not as easy as the administrators seam to think. I understand fully that admins would want to have an exact date so they can prepare, but software development, especially large scale development is like a war, its fluent. You can set scheduling goals but most of the time you want be able to keep them, sometimes it goes much faster sometimes much slower but usually somewhere inbetween, but one thing you can be sure of, if you set a release date, it want be kept.

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    Jason Halifax 16 years ago

    According to IT WEEK, “Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 was released to PC Builders last week and will appear on new machines and in retail boxes from mid-March. It will be held back from Windows Update until the same time in order to fix a problem beta testers encountered with some drivers, Microsoft said.”

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    Mike Swinford 16 years ago

    Any legal action for a defective product???

    It is now the end of Feb 2008 and no SP1. And no date for a fixed product. Just a lot of complaints. For past year a defective product has been sold on new machines.

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    Mike, the date is March 18. But I somehow doubt that SP1 will really solve your problems.

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    Joe 16 years ago

    Most of the “defective product” issues stem from manufactures selling sub par systems (i.e 512 ram w/the worst possible gfx card they can muster) and peoples inability to open a web browser and look for drivers. If the lan driver is the problem use a public pc (i.e library) or a friends pc and save it to pen drive or simply buy a product that is guaranteed bundled with vista drivers.

    On a side note good luck bringing a court case to Microsoft for a “defective product” as I’m running vista and it works perfectly fine. Sure theres a crash or two here and there but its no more so than I ran into on XP. Its just not for people who don’t understand pc’s and expect everything ever conceived in the pc world to work on their brand new system. You want new? Buy new stuff to use with it that supports it. If all this is to much for you stick with XP. It still has quite a large following which has been the trend with every OS Microsoft has released in the past. Whenever the successor to Vista comes about everyone will talk about how horrible it is and how much better Vista is the pc world never changes in that aspect.

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    mark 16 years ago

    I would have to agree with Joe. After getting a new laptop a few weeks ago with vista pre-installed I haven’t had any issues. Having said that I’m not sure why anyone would want to buy vista off the shelf to install on older (pre vista) machines. If you want to try new software, install a recent linux distro. I’ll give vista another month and decide as to whether I’ll go back to linux or not but so far I’ve been satisfied.

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    Rick 16 years ago

    Linux? Yuck. I would only use Linux on a computer for which I had no Windows XP or Vista install CD to use on it. I find Linux a LOT more difficult to update, use, and it lacks a lot of neat features Windows has built in. Just installing a theme can be a chore compared to XP (just download, install, and use).

    The claim Linux “Just works” is true until you try stuff such as wireless networking, which only work well with a few wireless chipsets. Also, Linux messed up my NTFS partition on my Windows harddrive (GRUB did at least). I specified for it to use my new Non-Windows Hard Drive, and yet it messed up the Boot table on both.

    Linux is neat, and I am no hater of it. I am very good with computers and such, maybe it’s just I do not know enough about Linux to truly enjoy it, but Linux, imo, needs a lot of work still to even consider trying to compete against Windows. Linux never seems “complete” to me.

    Vista does a lot of things right, and a lot wrong too, but the speed of XP makes me want to keep it until I can seriously upgrade my computer.

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    Mark 16 years ago

    Wow that’s rough. I guess I was just lucky when I installed linux 4 years ago and I’m not a high end computer user by any means. Just an average user with an average desktop I guess and all I ever usually do is check email and the internet. Any problems I had I usually scanned the web for solutions. Again this brings up the issue that it’s usually the hardware or other party software that causes a problem with the OS whether it is Windows or linux. I think people may get the wrong idea that when SP1 is released (to the public) that it will solve all their problems when it’s likely their hardware or ‘other’ software that’s likely the problem.

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    Mark, just for the record. It took me 6 months to be friends with Vista.

    Rick, come on! You can’t blame Linux for messing up your NTFS partition. This is enemy soil. 😉 But believe me, Windows is not really better when it comes to sharing territory with other operating systems.

    Joe, you hit the nail on the head. I remember quite well how everyone complained about Windows 95 and Windows 200.

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