Microsoft Readying Vista SP1 Beta for mid-July

Microsoft plans numerous fixes including an update to ReadyBoost

Microsoft officially launched Windows Vista for volume licensing on November 30. The company also simultaneously launched Office 2007 giving Microsoft a 1-2 punch in the realm of operating systems and productivity suites.

"These are game-changing products," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the launch. "It’s an incredible step forward for business computing in a year of unprecedented innovation from Microsoft. We expect that more than 200 million people will be using at least one of these products by the end of 2007."

Microsoft followed up with the retail launch of both products two months later on January 30. Both software products were made available in over 70 countries and over 40,000 retail locations.

Windows Vista is not even a year old, but Microsoft is already orchestrating the launch of Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta 1 for the week of July 16. Many companies will not even touch a new Microsoft operating system until the first service pack is released, so the quick rollout of SP1 isn't totally unexpected.

According to ZDNET's Mary Jo Foley, SP1 will RTM in November after just four months of testing. Microsoft will also release Windows Server 2008 at the same time.

Expected updates/fixes included with SP1 will be a revised Desktop Search, faster file copying and shutdown speeds, support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access, enhancements to BitLocker Drive Encryption and Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) support on x64 machines.

There will also be changes made to Windows ReadyBoost. There have been numerous complaints around the web concerning ReadyBoost and resuming from S3/S4 sleep. Sluggish performance on resume can be attributed to numerous writes to 'Readyboost.sfcache' on the ReadyBoost storage device.

According to Microsoft’s Robert Hensing, "[ReadyBoost] uses an AES 128 key that is generated once per OS start (the data in the file on the thumb drive is encrypted with this key) . . . the key isn't persisted anywhere (i.e. it lives in memory only) and so apparently when you sleep / hibernate - the key goes bye bye and thus you need to rebuild your 2GB ReadyBoost cache on your USB disk when you resume again."

Hensing continues, "Vista realizes that it needs to regenerate the ReadyBoost cache as soon as it wakes up and loads the USB drivers and realizes the ReadyBoost drive is plugged in and it starts helpfully doing this as soon as it can . . . ya know - while the OS is trying to page all that memory back into my 2GB of system RAM as well and generally restore the OS to a working state . . . sigh . . ."

The changes made to ReadyBoost in SP1 will ensure that cache data is reused during S3/S4 sleep so that 'Readyboost.sfcache' is not repopulated on resume.

Reference:Brandon Hill,dailytech