Vista Service Pack 1 is now available for Microsoft Partners and MSDN Subscribers. The download manager used is the Akamai torrent engine, so it comes down really fast. I had it downloaded, burned, and installed onto a test Vista Ultimate Virtual Machine within an hour and a half of finding out it was available via an MSDN Flash message. There is a combined x86 and x64 DVD image available. Everything went extremely smooth. Looks like SP1 (remember, this is a VM, so don't laugh at the performance index -- it's all constrained by the graphics emulation):
Next up will be my beautiful wife's little half-height desktop workstation, which is almost identical to the headless XP Pro/VS2008 development box I built in January (details here). And then finally will be my Vista Ultimate x64 workstation. Life is good.
There is also a Vista SP1 Clean up utility that is installed by Service Pack 1 for the really brave. Simply run vsp1cln.exe from an Admin Command Prompt to immediately remove all of the backup files saved by the update process (about 800MB). Hard disks are cheap, but wasted space is wasted space! Now if only I could find a way to remove all those Windows Updates backup files that piled up over the last year or so. It's not as easy as it was in XP, so if anyone knows of a good way to clean out all the now-useless pre-SP1 updates, just click on the old email link below and shout it out.
Bob Baker