chaaker said: "PS Is Remde on here? I havent "seen" him yet!"

What am I, chopped liver?  :)

By the way, I think we should have placed Windows Vista SP1 on the TechNet subscriber download center at the same time we put Windows Server 2008.  Pros are Pros in my book and they are paying for early access. 

Trust me, plenty of "feedback" has gone up the communications "channel" on this one.

My install of Vista Ultimate x64 is getting ready to download SP1, it has installed a couple of the updates to Windows Installer that are nessesary (as it did with the RC0-build, or RC1. I can't remember).

Vista has always been stable and fast on my machine, i don't think it ran faster with the RC of SP1 (i also don't think it ran slower on the other hand). Perhaps because i have had 4 GB RAM in the machine from the start. I have recently installed 8 GB RAM because my virtual machines suffered a bit, those SQL Server installs just loooves RAM.

My machine really likes this update: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937287, Windows Installer have tried to install it 7 or 8 times and i am beginning to wonder if perhaps i should roll back todays updates and just install todays patches first and then let the machines loveaffair cool off overnight. Naah, one more kiss from Windows Update and then to bed.

Hurry! It is now available to the technical community! Link.
PS Is Remde on here? I havent "seen" him yet!

I've got to agree.... Why announce an SP and then hold off on the release.  W2008 went RTM at the same time is going to be available long before Vista SP1.

Surely a release via the Download Centre is enough to stop the average person installing the update whilst making it available for the more technically minded and IT Pro communities

to add a bit, here's an excert from the Vista Team Blog that hints at part of the reason for the delay:

"As we update our customers to SP1, we want everyone to have a great install experience.  We are going to stage our rollout of SP1 for current Windows Vista users to be approximately concurrent with the availability of Windows Vista SP1 on new PCs and in stores.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers.  These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices.  Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers.  While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.

While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers.  To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers.  As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don't have any of the affected device drivers installed.  We're taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible."