Hi, Mike Nash here from the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft.Â Today we are excited to announce that we have released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese).

Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program.Â With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility.Â One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with the latest builds of our products — 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.

When we first released Windows Vista last year, there were lots of customers who had great experiences, but some had issues finding applications that worked well on Windows Vista; others had problems finding the right device drivers for some of the hardware devices that they used.Â The reason for these issues is that in order to improve the reliability and security of Windows Vista, we made some important architectural changes to the system.Â While this caused some issues in the short term, in the long term we know that these investments will improve both the reliability and security of the customer experience on Windows.Â Check out this blog post about the first year of Windows Vista security to see how some of these changes are paying off.

The good news is that this last year has been a great year of progress for Windows Vista in terms of improving application and device compatibility.Â For example, 98 out of the top-selling 100 applications have versions available for Windows Vista.Â And through the great work of our hardware partners, we now have 78,000 devices and components supported by Windows Update, up from about 34,000 in November 2006.Â As a result, we have licensed over 100 million copies of Windows Vista to date.

Service Pack 1 brings new improvements that are based on feedback we heard from our customers.Â It further improves the reliability and performance of Windows Vista.Â The information we collect thanks to tools like the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting help us learn about where and when customers are having issues with Windows Vista and the applications that run on it.Â Since these issues have a direct impact on our customers’ experiences, we’ve invested time and energy to make this better.Â While Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is an important milestone, we will continue to invest in the continuous improvement process.

More from source: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2008/02/04/announcing-the-rtm-of-windows-vista-sp1.aspx