Reports: Vista SP1 gold bits on track for next week

After both public and private betas galore, Microsoft is set to make the final, gold Windows Vista Service Pack (SP) 1 bits available, most likely next week.

This week, I've been getting reports of SP1 bits being available on torrents. I asked Microsoft earlier this week if these builds were, as some were saying, the final Vista SP1 bits. And, as usual, the Windows client team wasn't saying a whole lot.

On January 29, a Microsoft spokeswoman said Vista SP1 had yet to be officially released to manufacturing. The recent SP1 Release Candidate (RC) Refresh 2 is not the RTM build, the spokeswoman said. "And we're not commenting on the build number," she said, when I asked whether the "18000" build number was the RTM version.

The latest buzz is that Microsoft will announce that Vista SP1 has RTM'ed on Monday February 4, according to the Tech ARP site. Even if SP1 doesn't hit on February 4, its release is imminent, sources agree.

Vista SP1 will deliver in one package the various security, performance and reliability fixes Microsoft has been making to Vista for the past year-plus. SP1 also will include a few new minor features, including a less strident Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) piracy check and a tweak in the way Vista works with and displays third-party search engines.