Mike Nash from the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft announced yesterday (4 th February) that Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 has been released to manufacturing (RTM). Unfortunately although SP1 has been released to manufacturing, it will not be available to existing Windows Vista users until mid march. On the Windows Vista Team blog Nash said:

“Here’s the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:

• In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1. Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
• In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically. That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically. As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1. The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
• The remaining languages will RTM in April.”

If you wanted to get your hands on any of the Vista SP1 RC (release candidate) versions, it may be too late as the update appears to have been pulled from both the Microsoft Download website and Windows Update, I assume this is to avoid users downloading the RC version and then having to uninstall it to install the RTM version when it is available.

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