Vista Service Pack Beta 1 Coming Next Week?

For all those who have been eagerly waiting for Vista Service Pack, it seems like you’ll be able to catch the first beta of Vista SP1 as early as next week, with an official release date set for November this year. According to unnamed reports from Mary Jo Foley, Vista SP1 is going to be more about fixes than new features.

Service Pack 1 is expected to amend Vista’s desktop search feature to compensate for Google’s search integration battle which Microsoft lost, this means several of Vista’s built-in desktop search components can be replaced with third-party desktop search application such as Google Desktop Search. Here’s what you can expect to see in Vista SP1:

1. Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines
2. Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
3. Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
4. Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
5. The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
6. Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections

I’m pretty excited about Vista SP1 because so far, Vista has failed to live upto my expectations. If all goes as expected, Microsoft will just have 4 months to weed out all bugs from Service Pack 1, which comes just 10 months after the initial release of Vista.