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The move was a derail from the timetable set for the delivery of the RTM Build of Vista SP1, initially planned for general availability starting with mid-March 2008, according to Mike Nash, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management. Nash announced on February 4 that the final bits of Vista SP1 would find their way to end users through Microsoft Update, Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center in mid-March, and then through Automatic Updates beginning with mid-April.

But the fact that the end users of Vista got the short straw without even participating in the draw does not mean that the Redmond company did not release Vista SP1 RTM. Starting with February 8, the gold build of Vista's first service pack started shipping to the 15,000 testers that participated in the SP1 Beta program, then it was the turn of OEM partners, Volume License customers, MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers. And Microsoft simply flipped the wrong switch somewhere. Vista SP1 RTM was briefly up for grabs to a broad audience. But if you haven't gotten it last week, you will still have to wait until mid-March.

"We're very pleased with the progress we've made with Windows Vista to date. Since releasing SP1 to manufacturing on February 4th, we have made Windows Vista SP1 available to beta testers, MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers, as well as Volume Licensing customers. A build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group. The build was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC. For general availability, we are still planning to make SP1 broadly available in the mid-March timeframe," a Microsoft representative confirmed to Hardware 2.0.