Microsoft just posted a release candidate of Vista Service Pack 1 for its gaggle of official beta testers. The code will be unveiled for public scrutiny next week.
As for the final release schedule, here’s what Microsoft’s Nick White reports:
[W]e’re on track to complete and release SP1 in the first quarter of 2008. When SP1 is complete and we reach our release to manufacturing (RTM) milestone, then shortly after the standalone installer will be released to the Web in two waves. The first wave will consist of the standalone installer (x86 and x64) for the 5 initial languages — English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. These languages will be deployed shortly after the RTM milestone. The second wave will launch 8-12 weeks after the first and will consist of all remaining languages, for both chip architectures (x86 and x64)
I’ve finished downloading the x86 and x64 betas and will pass along my experiences when I can. For what it’s worth, “release candidate” is still beta. It can and will have bugs, so don’t even think about installing this not-quite-ready-for-prime-time player unless you know what you’re signing up for.
The good news is that previous betas in this series have been easy to remove. I expect this release to follow in that tradition.
Ed Bott 
Due to various problems on our Toshiba M400 machines we deployed the first released beta (Pre-Nov 1) on over one hundred machines. These machines are having far fewer issues even with a not done beta SP1. Hopefully others will have as much success with the RTM SP1.
At the risk of making a great big understatement here, Microsoft really -needs- for this Service Pack to succeed. So far, on one machine, a relatively old ThinkPad R50p with 2 gig of RAM the SP1 release candidate is doing nicely.
I had a lockup on first boot after the hour long service pack install, which required a hard power down. But after that one failure, everything is working well. I did a copy thing with 2.5 gig worth of 19,000 files and it took around seven minutes. Nearly as fast as it would have taken on my XP. That’s a good sign in my book. Boot times are not noticeably faster, but they were never slow on this machine with the early Vista.
I run “Classic” mode on all my machines, so I cannot comment on Aero or those other features offered by Vista.
I have been running the SP1 RC since this morning and noticed that on my HP DV9000, it reverted a lot of my updated drivers that I downloaded from HP. After installing, I would recheck your vendor for driver updates and reinstall them. My Conexant High Definition Audio was broken after installing SP1 RC, but reinstalling the latest drivers (re) fixed the problem.
So far, I’ve noticed SP1 RC chew up an extra 1GB of disk space after all files have been cleaned up – this is also after deleting all restore points. So, you’ll have to determine for yourself if the loss of space is worth it. Given that no features were added, I’m curious why I lose a gig.
Any changes to search?
Search in Vista has been extremely annoying to me. It doesn’t find files I know are there.
John, give me some examples of searches that fail. There are some known issues with search that are related to configuration and not to bugs. Also, are you using x64 or x86 Vista?
I’m using x86.
I’ll have to pay good attention next time and come back. I think it has to do with files in folders that Microsoft has determined that I have no business mucking around in.
Ed,
I don’t have a way to report issues with SP1 but I’ve found 2 issues that I’d like to report. First one is with Microsoft Update (I’m using Vista Ultimate x86). I no longer have access to hidden updates. They don’t appear when I click on Restore Hidden Updates. Prior to the SP1 install I didn’t install Dreamscene and did not “hide” it but since the SP1 install Dreamscene no longer is available as an Ultimate Extra. It completely disappeared which is strange because Bitlocker continues tol show up as an available Extra. Bitlocker was not installed or hidden prior to the SP1 install as well.
Has anyone had similar issues? How can I report these issues to Microsoft?
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
Alex