Foresight?

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy
James Madison (American 4th US President (1809-17), and one of the founding fathers of his country. 1751-1836)

Monday, April 2, 2007

Waiting to upgrade to Vista until the first Service Pack? Don't your breath!

I came across an interesting article at Information Week entitled "Microsoft Nixes 'Big Bang' Service Pack For Windows Vista". Now don't get the title wrong...there will be a service pack...albeit a lite one...with an undetermined date, but since Vista will rely heavily on using the Windows Update service to get it's fixes in increments through time. Vista will not rely on a huge service pack to fix a huge number of problems all at once. This does make sense as seen from someone in the tech support field, as when XP had both SP1 and SP2 released there were quite a few issues when applied to a lot of machines at once...leaving the support team scrambling from pc to pc fixing any variety of issues, whereas with the trickle patching you can opt out for specific fixes that may cause issues. Windows Update is not a new service by any means...but apparently Vista will be relying on it more heavily to reduce the size of the "lite" service packs in it's future.

So, if you are one of the hold outs for the first Service Pack...well...you just might wait a year or so and surrender the dreams of an SP1 upgrade track for that of "I am upgrading on January 30th, 2008!

As a side note...I have hammered Vista, but overall it is a nice OS...albeit I still hate UAC and some of the other security crap that is easily replaced with an open source equivalent or superior. DO IT!

RELATED ARTICLES
- "Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Canceled?" @ Softpedia
- "There may be no point in waiting for Vista's Service Pack 1" @ Houston Chronicle
- "Forget big service packs, Vista "high quality right out of the gate," says exec" @ ARS Technica
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