We were expecting an extended period before the first beta release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Microsoft has surprised us all with news of a mid-July release.

Mary Jo Foley says, “Word (from various sources who asked not to be named) is Microsoft is gearing up to drop Vista SP1 some time the week of July 16. And despite what Microsoft seemingly led Google, the U.S. Department of Justice and other company watchers to believe, the final version of Vista SP1 is sounding like November 2007. If Vista SP1 is released in November, the Windows client team will be sticking to a schedule company officials outlined a year ago, when the official plan of record was to release Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server) simultaneously.”

This will be a very short beta period, reduced from a year or more, and may result in users shunning the eventual release, as happened with the massive SP2 for Windows XP.

So what’s likely to be in Vista SP1? It’s expected to be more about fixes than new features, with elements enhancing or supplmenting features that are already there.

As well as required desktop-search modifications, other factors may be :

* Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines.
* Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
* 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
* The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
* Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections.

The above is just a provisional list, so don’t be surprised if it’s incomplete.