Vista SP1 Officially Heads Down the Pipe

A finished version of Windows Vista SP1 began shipping to manufacturers on Monday, but most customers will have to wait until mid-March to install it themselves.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed rumors of an impending Vista SP1 release on Monday by announcing that it had officially released to manufacturing, meaning physical copies of the update are being burned to discs and shipped to computer manufacturers. Ballmer broke the news at a “Microsoft Strategic Update” for investors on Monday morning.

While the release to manufacturing stage is already in progress, actual availability of the software for most users still sits over a month away. On the official Windows Vista blog, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows product management, Mike Nash, announced that SP1 would go live to customers through Microsoft’s download center in mid-March. In a separate announcement, the company noted that Microsoft Volume Licensing customers would be able to purchase the updated version of Windows Vista on March 1.

According to Nash, the long delay in availability is due to a driver issue identified in SP1’s beta stage. Since some hardware manufacturers did not follow conventions, updates to SP1 caused errors with their drivers, which Microsoft is now trying to hammer out with the hardware manufacturers prior to releasing SP1 on a wide scale.

Rumors of the release had already appeared Friday on the Malaysian news source TechARP, which reported that the release to manufacturing would appear in waves, with English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese coming out on Feb. 4, and all 36 “basic languages” coming one or two weeks later.