bill - 1:08 am on Feb 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

There's an announcement of this release on the Windows Vista team's blog:
Announcing the RTM of Windows Vista SP1 [windowsvistablog.com]

I notice this comment:

I've personally been running Windows Vista SP1 pretty exclusively for a few months and I've noticed that my systems run faster and more reliably than they did with the "Gold" release of Windows Vista.

Hopefully that indicates some of the performance issues will be cleared up with this release. We shall soon see...

And there is mention of the speed-up of network file copying. Other than that the article does not list a lot of specific improvements we can expect with SP1. However, that's what Microsoft has been saying all along about SP1. A lot of general work has been done under the hood, but they're not introducing new features to the OS.

Keep in mind that a lot of the same criticisms leveled at Vista today (hardware requirements, performance, compatibility) were all leveled at XP when it was first released. It wasn't until XP SP1 and XP SP2 that it became a good solid OS. I didn't see any rush to switch from Windows 2000 either. Vista SP1 will most likely be a step in the right direction for the development of this OS.