Paul Thurrott: After several months of silence, Microsoft last month finally revealed some concrete information about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), which I translated into my Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Revealed showcase. If you haven't read that article, please do so now: This preview, which is based off of more recent beta code and an in-depth discussion with various people working on SP1 at Microsoft, builds off of that article, but provides more information and detail. Windows Vista SP1, finally, is a known quantity.

Virtually everything I've learned about SP1 recently is good news, though anyone hoping for dramatic changes will be disappointed as this release marks a return to what Microsoft calls a more traditional type of service pack. Windows Vista SP1, unlike Windows XP Service Pack 2 (See my review) doesn't introduce major new functionality or break existing applications. But it does provide a number of valuable changes, including, yes, a new kernel version, a surprising array of performance, reliability, and compatibility fixes, a number of small functional changes, and an aggregation of previously-released security fixes and other hot-fixes. Developed in tandem with Windows Server 2008--and not just concurrently, but literally together--Windows Vista SP1 once again realigns the development paths of the Windows client and server products. So much so, in fact, that the first Windows Server 2008 service pack will be the same as Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2). These products, Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008, are literally being developed in lock step.