Vista SP2 will provide users with improved support for various media, allowing users to burn Blu-ray natively and take full advantage of Bluetooth 2.1. Searching should become more robust with Windows Search 4.0, while Windows Connect Now hopes to remedy sometimes laborious Wi-Fi setups. And in a turn to the extremely techie, the update enables the"exFAT file system to support UTC timestamps," which is supposed to correct file synchronization issues across time zones.

So far it all sounds like a few minor but useful tweaks. And we'd agree with Microsoft that no one should wait for SP2 if they want to take Vista for a test drive. [Windows Vista Blog]

Microsoft Mac BU Delivers Strongest Launch in History of Office for Mac

Group releases Service Pack 1, announces the return of Visual Basic for Applications in next version.

REDMOND, Wash. — May 13, 2008 — Microsoft Corp.'s Macintosh Business Unit (Mac BU) today announced details about the success of Office 2008 for Mac and reaffirms its commitment to future products for the Mac. Office 2008 launched at Macworld Expo 2008, and sales for the productivity suite continue to soar, selling faster than any previous version of Office for Mac in the past 19 years. The Mac BU developed Office 2008 to help Mac users simplify their work with a Mac-like interface, tools to easily create professional documents, and, most notably, the most cross-platform compatible suite on the market for the Mac. The Mac BU today is releasing Service Pack 1 (SP1) that provides increased stability, security and performance enhancements to the suite. The group also is providing a glimpse at the road map of Office for Mac by announcing the return of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in the next version.

"The response has been amazing — since we launched in January, the velocity of sales for Office 2008 is nearly three times what we saw after the launch of Office 2004," said Craig Eisler, general manager of the Mac BU at Microsoft. "As we set our course for future versions, we are working closely with customers and will also expand our staff to ensure that Office for Mac remains the most powerful and compatible productivity suite for Mac customers."

Office 2008 for Mac Gets Updates Requested by Users

The Mac BU consistently seeks and uses customer feedback to identify, prioritize and then improve its products through beta programs in pre-release stages. The team looks to user forums and tools such as the Microsoft Error Reporting Protocol (MERP), which allows customers to anonymously communicate issue reports, once a product is launched. With the launch of SP1, the Mac BU is addressing the top issues as reported by customers via MERP and other feedback channels. Office 2008 for Mac SP1 features key suitewide updates for increased stability, increased security and overall performance improvements. Users also will find application-specific updates, including the following:

Microsoft Office Excel

· Compatibility. Improved compatibility with files exchanged between Excel 2008 for Mac and Excel 2003 and Excel 2007 for Windows

· Custom Error Bars. Restored formatting option on the Error Bars panel for data series

· Printing. More reliable printing for elements on Excel 2008 workbooks

Microsoft Entourage

· Calendar. Significant enhancements to improve calendar view and all-day reminders with reoccurrence

· Exchange Server support. Overall improvement to synchronization support, including removing attachments from Exchange Server messages and synchronizing to the server, as well as support for editing the contents of Exchange Server messages via AppleScript and synchronizing the changes to the server

· E-mail images. Ability to send and view images in Entourage from third-party tools

Microsoft Office Word

· Printing. Improved accuracy when orienting tables with cell shading

· Document map. Improved reliability and responsiveness to select items

· Notebook layout. Updated formatting, recording status and a variety of display options

Microsoft Office PowerPoint

· Printing. Improvements to eliminate crashing when printing documents to high-dpi printers and increased overall printing speed by 10 times on some large presentations

· Mobile viewing. Ability to view Mac .PPTX files on Windows Mobile phones

· AppleScript. Ability to use the PowerPoint selection object in AppleScript to implement custom scripts that operate on the current selection in PowerPoint

Customers can download the update for free at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx1, and it will be also available from Microsoft Auto Update.

VBA Returns to Future Versions of Office for Mac

The Mac BU also announced it is bringing VBA-language support back to the next version of Office for Mac. Sharing information with customers as early as possible continues to be a priority for the Mac BU to allow customers to plan for their software needs.2 Although the Mac BU increased support in Office 2008 with alternate scripting tools such as Automator and AppleScript — and also worked with MacTech Magazine to create a reference guide, available at http://www.mactech.com/vba-transition-guide — the team recognizes that VBA-language support is important to a select group of customers who rely on sharing macros across platforms. The Mac BU is always working to meet customers' needs and already is hard at work on the next version of Office for Mac.

It's great to see Toshiba jacking up the specs on it to make it a total badass in the thin, light and fast category—with, ahem, 3 USB ports, and in addition to that, a FireWire port and a PC card slot. But Toshiba is still only offering Vista Business on these guys, and when I tested an R500 early on, it was Vista that totally stunk up the machine.

Toshiba's US site still shows the model capped at 64GB (for $3,000), but we assume it will be updated soon. When you do, Toshiba, please offer XP as an option. Then again, you never know how many of the issues were resolved by SP1. [Register]

PC World: "Pre-SP1, the [1.9GB] file copy averaged 384 seconds; post-SP1, the copy process showed a noticeable improvement, averaging just 348 seconds to complete the same task. That's a 9 percent improvement, a difference you're likely to notice... It's not life-altering when you're talking about just 2GB of data, but if the performance improvement holds across larger data sets, that will be a big boon to anyone copying data in the Vista environment."

PC Mag: "From the beginning, Vista had some significant issues with excessive hard drive use. The drive light would routinely stay fully or mostly lit for many minutes at a time, even when most programs had been closed. The downloaded SP1 improved this quite a bit, resulting in crisper performance... even with Office 2007 Professional, Adobe Creative Suite CS3, and Norton System Works 2008 on the machine and various components of each running (Outlook, Word, InDesign, Acrobat, and Norton AV, for instance), the drive light stayed remarkably unlit on the SP1 clean install. This issue bears watching: If the difference turns out to be as significant as it seems, then it alone is reason to upgrade."

Anandtech: "Compared to where we were a year ago, our general recommendation for Vista is unchanged. We are however impressed with the progress of the x64 versions of Vista over the past year, after feeling like it was lagging behind Vista x86 from beta up through the release version of Vista. Vista x64 is now clearly on par with Vista x86 and we have no concerns about its compatibility or performance."

CNet: "Do you need Windows Vista SP1? Yes and no. It's always good to install the latest (read: patched) code for any operating system. But downloading and installing the update will take some users a few hours without any visible or tangible improvements to their systems."

Giz Commenters:
We received a huge response to our poll question the other day, "How's Windows Vista SP1 working out?" Most of you didn't notice much of a difference after the install, but a good portion of you thought it was either the best or worst decision you've ever made. Here are some of the most informative things your fellow commenters had to say about the upgrade:

Topcat: Installed without incident in ~20 minutes for me. RAM use is down 7-10% on average from the OS (Ultimate-32), and it fixed some of the problems I'd had frequently

shiftyeyedgoat: I can definitely notice a difference in network transfer speeds. I mean, it's multitudes faster.

Claystil: My startup time seems to be shorter and windows connects to the network MUCH faster.

JoeStalin: No difference. Large file transfers still suck ass.

Darrone: ...it boned my computer harder than Eliot Spitzer at Scores.

The majors seem to echo what everyone else has been saying; while updating is usually the right thing to do, SP1 doesn't have enough noticeable changes to make you jump out of your seat. The commenters were more outspoken in their distaste for the update, some even reporting several crashes, but overall they seemed to like it as well. Putting all of the feedback together, we're going to give Vista SP1 an "upgrade" verdict, but don't expect too much from it.

Today however, Windows Update tells me I have one important update to install on my 64bit Windows Vista Home Premium-based system - Windows Vista Service Pack 1 for x64 based Systems (KB936330). Other users don't yet seem to have been prompted for the install and even my own x86-based Vista laptop doesn't have the update available.

Could this be an strange occurrence or a hoax? Any of you have got the same notification? Tell us in the comments. (Yes, wrong headline. Fixed.)

Update: according to news.com, Microsoft is withdrawing SP1 for Vista. 'We've heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287,' wrote Nick White, Microsoft project manager. 'Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.'" [Hexus - Thanks Parm Mann and Slashdot]

This means better stability, faster file handling and improved device compatibility. It also contains some future proofing, including support for DirectX 10.1, UEFI firmware and ExFAT flash-memory file format. On the subject of overall speed, some early Battlemodo action suggests that there's a nice bump here.

In terms of reliability, Microsoft tells us, "SP1 users likely to have fewer disruptions," defining a disruption as anything from a full-on system crash to the likelier application failure. Microsoft quantifies this with "average time between disruptions." Initially on Vista, you could go about 17 hours without a disruption, now it's double that at 34 hours between disruptions. When I asked about how this compared with XP, Microsoft said it was a tough comparison, since they lacked the detailed telemetry on XP. (Perhaps this is a convenient shortcoming.)

As you might have heard, Microsoft is also claiming that, security wise, Vista is not only better than XP but that it's better than Linux and Mac OSX as well, using security updates to 10.4 Tiger in the first year as a comparative example. [Microsoft]

The difference comes from the way Microsoft dumped the XP-style buffering for network transfers, which resulted in a mismatch between Vista and XP (and a slow file transfer). The upside is that you'll be over to fling files over your home network much faster if you have one of those fancy WHS machines. However, if you run applications that use the Multimedia Class Scheduler, like Windows Media Player, it'll still kill network performance even with the new boost. [ZDNet via Crunchgear]