Microsoft still isn't commenting on when a beta of Service Pack 1 for Vista will be officially released (our money is on November), but the company has posted two updates that are expected to be part of that final package: the "performance and reliability" update and the "compatibility and reliability" update. These are official releases.

The "standalone updates" have been posted to Microsoft's support site, and users will need to validate their Vista installs via WGA to download them. A Microsoft spokesperson would not indicate when the patches would find their way to Windows Update, but the company confirms that these are not beta releases. We suspect that they will roll out automagically on the next Patch Tuesday, August 14.

The quick and dirty: Explorer file transfer (copy/move) slowness looks to have been fixed (finally), hibernate and sleep now actually work as advertised (at least on my Toshiba R400), and a load of video card support issues have been rolled up. For those of you keeping track, the MD5 hashes on these updates match those that were leaked last week.

KB 938979, aka the "performance and reliability" update, addresses "poor memory management performance," as well as a handful of specific issues, including a nasty problem installing printers when User Account Control is disabled. Also gone is the ever-so-annoying networking flaw that would strike TCP/IP dead after a computer wakes from hibernation, and offline file synchronization is reportedly fixed, according to the release notes.

The big kicker, however, is the "file transfer" problem, which Microsoft describes as follows:

When you copy or move a large file, the "estimated time remaining" takes a long time to be calculated and displayed.

Those of you who have run into this problem know it by its true description: "takes forever just to copy a few hundred megabytes of data!" With the patch installed, file copying is certainly faster in my testing but still doesn't feel as fast as it should be. Nevertheless, it is a major improvement in my opinion.

KB 938194, also known as the "compatibility and reliability" update, should probably be called the "now you can play games with your computer" update. It purports to address a handful of gaming-related problems, including compatibility issues with NVIDIA's G80 series of cards. The lame printer spooling bug that was afflicting many of you has also been addressed.

Look before you leap

While this isn't beta software, I'd recommend reading both KB entries and hitting the discussion thread before installing the updates just to see what to expect and what your fellow Vista users are experiencing. I've had both updates running on two computers all afternoon without incident, but I will note that the compatibility update did stop my laptop from shutting down after the first install, but not after subsequent reboots.