Microsoft has announced that the Service Pack 1 beta will be released for public tests in the coming weeks. The awaited service pack has caused some controversy as it will not bring any significant changes that hasn’t been released through Windows Update, while companies have been waiting to upgrade until Service Pack 1 arrives. Service Pack 1 will mainly be a collection of security and stability updates, but will make a couple of changes to the overall Vista experience. Beside the stability and performance related updates, there are a few changes worth mentioning.
The encryption tool can now work across local drives, not just the system partition. Vista 64-bit also gains support for EFI, the four year old replacement for BIOS, which is still not around to any extent worth mentioning.
Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol has been added to the Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) platform. This protocol provides full network virtual private network (VPN) remote access connections without the challenges that many other protocols have to face when traversing firewalls, NATs, and proxies.
Vista SP1 adds support for the exFAT file system. This format is expected to be used by future consumer products and flash storage. It also adds Secure Digital (SD) Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA) support for faster and less demanding transfers to and from SD media.
Last but not least the service pack adds support for Direct3D 10.1. The next generation of graphics cards from both NVIDIA and ATI is expected to support these updated DX10 instructions.
Unfortunately it seems that SP1 will not arrive in November, despite stubborn rumors, as Microsoft says that it expects SP1 to be released in its final form the first quarter 2008.
More detailed information can be found in the official Vista blog.
