There’s a frequently repeated piece of conventional wisdom: many businesses have delayed buying computers with Vista because they never purchase Microsoft’s first release of an operating system. It’s not clear whether that’s true, but for whatever reason, Microsoft bumped up the announced schedule for Vista’s first service pack and beta testing of SP1 began recently.
Today Microsoft posted two updates for Vista – the first one identified as the “performance and reliability pack,” and the second one called the “compatibility and reliability pack.” There’s a list of specific fixes addressed by each update, and there’s reason to think these updates are the heart of what will eventually be released as Vista Service Pack 1.
At the moment these can be manually downloaded; they may be added to the Automatic Updates service at some point. I’m not aware of any Vista users facing hot issues solved by these updates, but I feel safe suggesting that Vista users install them if they want to stay current.
