According to Ed Bott over at ZNet the case for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 just got a lot stronger.

“When SP1 ships sometime in early 2008, it will strip away one of Vista’s most annoying features and remove one of the most persistent objections to Vista’s adoption.”

Microsoft will remove the reduced functionality mode — the so-called “kill switch” — from the operating system, “restoring the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program to its original role as a series of persistent but nonlethal notifications”.

WGA senior product manager Alex Kochis talking to reporters and analysts, said, “Based on customer feedback, we will not reduce user functionality on systems determined to be non-genuine”.

With SP1 installed, a Windows Vista system that fails validation, which Microsoft terms “non genuine”, will continue to work exactly as before, except for some minor annoyances. The desktop background will be black. If you change it, a scheduled task will paint it black again one hour later, and you’ll see a small “Activate Now” alert in the same location, which apparently you can ignore.

Sounds hairy, though.

According to Ina Fried of News.com “The first Vista service pack may serve dual purposes for Microsoft: fixing the operating system’s rough edges while simultaneously indicating that it’s ready for mass adoption.”

Nonetheless, in announcing its plans to release Service Pack 1 early next year, Microsoft is noting that the milestone remains an important signal for some businesses that the operating system has reached a level of maturity. Many analysts have consistently advised companies to hold off on Vista deployments until the first service pack’s arrival.

Shanen Boettcher, a general manager in the Windows unit, says, “There’s always a portion of the market that has that M.O. I would expect that we will see a little bit of an increase.”

For those of us already using Windows Vista, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about.

There will be no public beta of the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 “anytime soon”. Only a small “select” group of testers will receive the early build. And Microsoft doesn’t have a timeline for when a public beta will be released.

Microsoft announces :

There will be a Windows Vista service pack and our current expectation is that a beta will be made available sometime this year. Service packs are part of the traditional software lifecycle — they’re something we do for all Microsoft products as part of our commitment to continuous improvement, and providing early test builds is a standard practice that helps us incorporate customer feedback and improve the overall quality of the product.

Service packs are just one example of the work we do to constantly improve the Windows experience. We also deliver improvements to Windows via Windows Update, which is an excellent channel for providing our customers with the most significant updates as they happen. And, since Windows Vista launched, we have continued working with partners to improve overall device coverage and application compatibility. There are now more than 2.1 million supported devices and more than 2,000 logoed applications for Windows Vista. We think customers will have a great experience using Windows Vista today.

We’ll hang on in there, then.

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.