Test version of Windows Vista update to be released soon

Microsoft is spreading the word today about when the first major update to Windows Vista will be available.

A limited test version of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will be released to about 10,000 testers "in a few weeks," said Shanen Boettcher, general manager of Windows product management. He declined to be more specific.

The company aims to have a final version of the service pack completed and released during the first three months of 2008.

The timing of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Vista, something the company has been reticent to talk about, is important to corporate IT departments evaluating or deploying the new Microsoft operating system. Other companies are waiting for the service pack to start the process of moving to Vista.

With SP1, Boettcher said, Microsoft is aiming to improve the quality of the product with specific improvements including: support for new hardware standards; changes to how Windows can be managed by IT departments; general reliability and security updates.

That's in contrast to the second service pack for Vista's predecessor, Windows XP, which was almost like a new operating system in itself. XP Service Pack 2 was released in August 2004.

"[Vista SP1] is not really a feature-rich delivery vehicle for us, so you're not going to see a lot of features or [user interface] changes in the product," Boettcher said.

Microsoft also announced timing for the third Windows XP service pack, though it's clearly not trumpeting this release. XP SP3 is due in test form in the next few weeks, Boettcher said, and should be finalized by the first half of 2008.

He said XP SP3 is "an end-of-life roll out for Windows XP" containing previous online updates and "small updates for hardware support."

Microsoft is trying to quickly move as many customers from XP to Vista, which was released to businesses Nov. 30 and broadly on Jan. 30. Reviews of Vista have been lukewarm and the volume of griping from some prominent technology bloggers has been growing. Wall Street analysts were also underwhelmed by Vista's impact after the company's most-recent quarterly financial report.

Application compatibility, an issue Microsoft has been racing to improve with Vista, can be hurt by changes made in service packs. A prominent example is the automatic firewall that came with XP Service Pack 2, which had to be manually disabled to make many applications work again.

"As opposed to previous service packs, there's nothing that we're knowingly doing [with SP1] that's breaking any applications," Boettcher said. "... All of our preliminary data is showing very high app compatibility and our intention is to hold that very high."

Another change expected in SP1 — which Boettcher didn't mention — has to do with desktop search. In a dispute that spilled out in media leaks and court documents earlier this year, Google accused Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior because of the way Vista handled competing desktop search applications.

In June, Microsoft pledged in a court filing to change the desktop search feature in Vista so that competitors' products can be set as the default choice for finding files stored locally on a computer. The company pledged to make the changes as part of the first Vista service pack.

Microsoft planned to offer more details of Service Pack 1 on its Windows Vista blog, http://windowsvistablog.com/, and on Tech Net, a site for IT professionals: http://technet.microsoft.com/.

Benjamin J. Romano: bromano@seattletimes.com