I am pleased to see information about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 start to appear.

This is good news because I know a lot of system builders, friends and colleagues have been holding off migrating to Windows Vista for many reasons, only one of which I will discuss here.

It’s fairly common knowledge the first release of most software causes the most headaches and as such many users wait for the second release or the first service pack. Such an approach may well be applicable in certain industries e.g. airlines, financials, etc. However, it appears that this approach has made its way into the general market-space too – many home users have avoided first releases from major software vendors leaving the initial uptake to the so-called early adopters. Whilst there are some scenarios where I agree with this, in my opinion Windows Vista wasn’t one of them. But it’s sad to say, I was somewhat outspoken on this point. This was despite switching the desktop over to Vista in January (after spending November and December working with Vista and XP side-by-side); the laptop followed in May.

I haven’t endured any show-stoppers, the only problems that I’ve seen were fairly painless to fix. Indeed, I am happy say that I have and am enjoying the Windows Vista experience. As a developer, I treat my installations fairly hard, so it’s not that I’ve been word processing for the last six months. I’ve got two pretty heavy installations, plenty of software installed, the usual array of devices and networking requirements, etc. Yes, there have been a few odd moments, particularly in the security arena, but nothing that the built-in help couldn’t solve. Personally, the extra security is a good thing: now is the time for enforcing security from the operating system up, not leaving as a voluntary thing that end users have to deal with.

Now that we have a reasonably clear time-line for the release for Windows Vista SP1 and with the continued high density beta testing offered by many thousand very early adopters, TechNet and MSDN subscribers and Microsoft MVPs, you can be sure that Windows Vista SP1 will be very well tested. It’s worth noting that the initial beta testers will be limited to a small group, as detailled in the paper above.

If you have been putting off migrating to Windows Vista, waiting for the second release or service pack, now is the time to migrate. Don’t wait until 2008, put yourself ahead of the learning curve: migrate now, with the knowledge that the current release of Windows Vista and its interim updates (via Windows Update) is a remarkably stable, usable and productive environment – I’m not alone in this thought either. And things will only get better in 2008…

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