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When you install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on your computer, the SP1 installer will not remove the older versions of Vista files from the hard drive. This is because the older files may be required in case you decide to uninstall SP1 later from the system.
Naturally, these files occupy important disk space. If you are satisfied with the performance of Windows Vista SP1 and unlikely to remove it later, why not reclaim some disk space by removing all the older Vista files.
There are no manual steps involved. Just open your Windows command prompt and type vsp1cln.exe (short for Vista SP1 Cleaner). It takes less than a minute to execute.

*vsp1cln.exe is added to your Windows Vista System folder after you install Vista SP1.

This will make  Windows Vista Service Pack 1 permanent on this computer. All the older files are deleted now and your hard disk has tons of extra space for other important files like videos and photos.
You computer need not be connected to the Internet for running the Vista SP1 cleaner tool. And you won’t be able to remove Windows Vista Service Pack 1 later.

"Today, you can now download Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update," Microsoft Product Manager Nick White wrote on the company's Vista blog Tuesday morning. "For those of you eager to receive the benefits of Windows Vista SP1 -- you can now do so!"

The release was not unexpected; text on Amazon.com discovered this weekend implied the download would be available March 18, with the retail product being released March 19, although the mention of the download has since been removed from the shopping site.

Microsoft has released Vista SP1 for five languages: English, Spanish, German, French and Japanese. Updates for other languages are expected to start rolling out in April.

SP1 releases are typical milestones for Microsoft products as many IT shops wait until the first update before deploying. Vista's update comes a little more than a year after its initial release.

According to Microsoft, the SP1 update is designed to improve Vista's reliability and application compatibility, among other changes.

In his post, White also commented on the driver issue that initially delayed the early release of SP1 to IT professionals. "We've completed our analysis and are happy to report that many of these issues were fixed between the release candidate (RC) and the final version," he wrote. "We identified a small number of device drivers that may be problematic after an update from Windows Vista to Windows Vista SP1."

A list of drivers that may still cause problems with the upgrade is available here (scroll down). White also recommends reading Knowledge Base article 948187 before installing the upgrade.

For now, Vista SP1 is an optional download; it will become a forced upgrade starting in "mid-April" on any computers that have Windows Update set to automatic download.

Microsoft's Singularity operating system is now open to the public for download, under a Microsoft academic, non-commercial license. Inside is a fully compilable and bootable version of what could be the basis for the future of Windows, or maybe simply an experiment to demonstrate .NET's capabilities. Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena. The
project is available on CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/singularity

Microsoft will shortly make available the test version of Internet Explorer 8, which is set for final release in the first half of this year.

The Web site ActiveWin on Monday published the contents of a beta invitation, which said Microsoft is nearing a launch date for Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, which will be available for download and testing.
According to the Internet Explorer blog, the next version of Microsoft's Web browser is set for release in the first half of the year.
Microsoft executives are expected to reveal further details about the browser's features at the software maker's upcoming Mix conference in Las Vegas next week.
Last year at Mix, Microsoft outlined some of the features planned for IE 8, including standards compliance and tools to ease Web development.

Product review: Windows Server 2008 is the host with the most, and the perfect guest

Microsoft's slimmer and stronger server OS, bolstered by virtualization, networking, and security advances, is an upgrade that IT can't refuse, a 200-pound gorilla that eats commercial Linux

A standing complaint about Windows Server is its resource footprint. Those in IT just take as rote that it requires lots of memory, lots of CPU, and lots of disk to put any substantial services on the air with Windows Server 2003. I think it's safe to say that the typical x86 rack server's characteristics reflect the requirements of Windows Server. Microsoft's big OS has always been designed under the presumption that it will have a full physical server to itself.
In Windows Server 2008, Microsoft delivers a 64-bit server OS with a smaller minimum resource footprint than Windows Vista. It varies by edition; Windows Server 2008 Datacenter doesn't focus so much on shedding the pounds, but it, too, picks up the speed benefits from the slimmer Server Core, which was created to be a practically weightless virtualized guest OS. IT shops are likely to use Windows Server 2008 the same way they use Windows Server 2003 now, only now they can run lots of independent virtual Windows Servers that scale in features and footprint across a broad range of options. More...

Microsoft has increased: storage on Windows Live Skydrive to 5GB, up by a multiple of five from its previous limit of 1GB (the 1GB having doubled the original 500mb in October).

The more notable point is that Microsoft continues to grow its online storage offering when Google simply hasn’t launched the fabled Platypus online storage solution despite years of speculation and rumors. This is one space where Microsoft has the upper hand, and a 4gb storage jump will further increase the appeal of the product.

On top of the extra storage, Windows Live Skydrive has dropped the beta tag, and is now available in the following additional countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

As of press time, the products are:

Blocked from Starting

• BitDefender AV or Internet Security, version 10
• Fujitsu Shock Sensor 2.1.0.0
• Jiangmin KV Antivirus 10
• Jiangmin KV Antivirus 2008
• Trend Micro Internet Security 2008
• ZoneAlarm Security Suite 7.1

Do Not Run

• Iron Speed Designer 5.0.1
• Xheo Licensing 3.1
• FreeAllegiance 2.1

Loss of Functionality

• NYT Reader
• Rising Personal Firewall 2007
• Novell ZCM Agent 10.01

As Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing and IT professionals this month, the list may grow -- especially after the update goes live for consumers in March.

Windows Vista SP1, which began rolling out via Automatic Update, has left some users' machines unbootable. The update loops forever on "Configuring updates: Stage 3 of 3 0%
complete. Do not turn off your computer." "Shutting down"... restart and loop. Echostorm notes having found traces of what sounds like the same bug in early beta releases of SP1. It's unclear how many users are affected. So far there is no word on a fix from Microsoft.

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/showpost.aspx?postid=2848906&siteid=17

Windows Vista, whether the source setup files and after installation system files, took up a lot of hard disk drive space. Just try to imagine from the fact that Windows XP fits into a CD (maximum 700 MB), while Windows Vista requires a DVD (max 4.7 GB). Windows Vista is fat and obese, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to ’slim’ down the Vista to make it uses less disk space and reclaim some storage for larger and larger media and date files. The tips below suggests several not system critical files that can be safely deleted and removed from the system without causing instability.

More...

There's a growing revolt among Microsoft TechNet & MSDN subscribers who are frustrated that they can't yet get Vista SP1 and test their software on it. This can't be good news for anyone hoping that SP1 will have better compatibility. While SP1 has been released to manufacturing, and pirate copies are easy to find, Microsoft is withholding it from subscribers until early March. According to the article, some frustrated users are upset enough that they plan to abandon TechNet entirely and turn to piracy.According to the Technet blog, they have pushed up the date to before the end of February, though no exact date is mentioned.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=printArticleBasic&articleId=9061838
http://www.google.com/search?q=vista+sp1+tpb
http://blogs.technet.com/technetplussubscriptions/archive/2008/02/11/technet-plus-sp1-availability-update.aspx

You may have seen reports of Microsoft Windows Vista Service Pack 1 floating on the net by now. I stumbled a couple of links and torrents on several discussion boards but most of them are either RC1 (Refresh 1), Fakes or just plain old Trojans. Surely, a lot of people doesn’t want to wait several days to get a hold of their own copy and install it on there system.
For couple of days, the only people who can get a valid Vista Service Pack 1 are some beta testers and people who have an MSDN accounts. Luckily, several people made this available to the general public, so you don’t need to wait until March to get a hold of Vista Service Pack 1. You have two ways on getting the Service Pack.

More...

Overview of the Process

The process includes the following steps:

1. 1. Download or create a script that adds two registry keys to your Windows Vista system. If you don't want to download the script, the folks at Softpedia provide the script code in plain text so you can see what it does. Copy the text and save it to a command file (.cmd) with Notepad or another text editor.
2. 2. Open a command prompt with administrative privileges on a system you use for Windows Vista testing (remember, you're going to install a beta of a service pack, so be smart and don't risk breaking your everyday system). To do this, right-click the command prompt shortcut (by default, it's in Accessories), select Run as Administrator, and provide the needed credentials.
3. 3. Run the script you downloaded or created in Step 1.
4. 4. Run Windows Update and install the KB935509 update.
5. 5. Reboot.
6. 6. Run Windows Update again and install the KB937287 update.
7. 7. Reboot.
8. 8. Run Windows Update again and install the KB938371 update.
9. 9. Reboot.
10. 10. Run Windows Update again and install the Vista SP1 beta. Keep in mind that according to some users at My Digital Life, you might need to wait an hour or so before the Vista SP1 beta shows up in your list of available updates.

You Can Get Vista SP1 Beta Now, But Should You?

After working with (and being worked over by) Windows Vista betas during the writing of Maximum PC Microsoft Windows Vista Exposed and other Vista books I have contributed to, I'm not personally keen on spending time with another Windows Vista beta. Users around the web report wildly different impressions - some report better performance, but others report a mixed bag of results. As with any beta, your mileage may vary. And keep in mind that just in case you're tempted to forget you're running a beta, installing the SP1 beta puts a removable evaluation version number stamp on your desktop.

Microsoft loves Aurora's in Windows Vista. They hide an amazing boot screen that can easily be enabled. And they provide a tool for 3D benchmarks that uses aurora animation.

Windows Aurora? Enjoy!

Submited in a comment today. The project looks great. So, we are giving it its own place:
Welcome to the .NET Mass Downloader project. While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue!

http://www.codeplex.com/NetMassDownloader

Microsoft is planning to bring the sexy, uh, the scripting back to Visual Basic.
In a talk entitled “Bringing Scripting (Back) to Visual Basic” at the Lang.Net conference here Jan. 31, Paul Vick, Microsoft’s principal architect for Visual Basic said now that his team has shipped Visual Basic 2008, “We found ourselves looking back a lot.”

More...

Windows Vista 32-bit version of the 16 multi-lingual user interface kits (MUI) official download links.

Chinese (PRC) language kits :
Download

Chinese (Hong Kong SAR) language kits :
Download

English language kits :
Download

Italian language kits :
Download

Spanish language kits :
Download

Swedish language kits :
Download

Japanese language kits :
Download

Portuguese (Brazil) language kits :
Download

Norwegian language kits :
Download

Dutch language kits :
Download

Finnish language kits :
Download

French-language kits :
Download

Russian language kits :
Download

German language kits :
Download

Danish language kits :
Download

Korean language kits :
Download

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.
These efforts are largely made possible by the inherent portability of Trolltech's Qt development toolkit, the underlying framework used by KDE software. Qt is designed for cross-platform portability and even uses native widgets on both Windows and Mac OS X. Trolltech uses a multi-licensing model that makes Qt available under the GPL for open-source software development and requires programmers to buy a commercial license for proprietary development. Previously, only Mac OS X and Linux/X11 versions were available under the GPL, but Trolltech decided to make the Windows version available under the GPL too with the introduction of Qt 4. This finally opened the door for porting open-source KDE applications to the Windows operating system.
There are also several key technologies in the KDE 4 stack that make the desktop environment more conducive to porting. The most notable of these technologies are the Phonon multimedia abstraction layer and the Solid hardware wrapper library, which are both described in my recent review of KDE 4.0.
The KDE development community's adoption of CMake is another major factor that has contributed to the increased portability of the desktop environment. KDE's build system was previously based on Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous. The migration to CMake instantly simplified portability issues because CMake has very robust built-in support for generating makefiles for widely-used compilers on all three major operating systems. CMake can even automatically generate project files for commonly-used IDEs like KDevelop, Visual Studio, and XCode.

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SOMEONE upset with the growing size of the popular "Nero" cd and dvd-burning application decided to take matters into his or her own hands, and released unofficial "Nero Lite" and "Nero Micro" versions.

I remember the time when Nero -which seemed to come bundled with almost every decent CD-writer at some point- was a small and efficient application. It basically "got the job done", with a solid engine and decent interface. In the last few years, however, the size of the beast grew considerably, with the latest build 7.7.5.1 -released last month- being a 190MB download that does not include help files and which in addition lists "1 GB hard disk space" for a full install among its requirements. What used to be a small CD and DVD burning application now is a huge suite composed of the original "Burning Rom" plus: "Nero Express", "Nero CoverDesigner", "Nero WaveEditor", "Nero Toolkit", "Nero Vision", "Nero Recode", "Nero PhotoSnap", "Nero BackItUp", "Nero ImageDrive" and a few others I'm probably leaving out.

The "Nero Micro" installer

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Overview of Windows Vista Service Pack 1

This white paper presents an overview of Windows Vista SP1 and the improvements it contains.

Notable Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate

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