The big day is just a week away.

    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.

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