Thor Schrock

The first beta release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is set to be distributed to select beta testers in Mid September. This update is not recommended for the general public however.

This beta will be followed by Release Candidate version (RC-1) which will be available to more of the general public.

Once the Service Pack is available to the public, it will contain all of the Windows Vista patches released to date, as well as some interesting new functionality:

• Support for Direct 3D 10.1
• support for Secure Digital (SD) Advanced Direct Memory Access
• (DMA) to improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization
• Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files, shut down and resume Vista machines
• Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
• Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
• Improvements to battery life
• Improvements to Internet Explorer 7 performance by reducing CPU utilization and speeding JavaScript parsing

If you do end up getting your hands on the beta Service Pack, I would recommend you not install it. Wait for the public release available through Windows Update or you might be one of the lucky people who get to report a bug in the pdate 😉