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SP1 represents not only a maturity milestone for Windows Vista, but also a stage in the life of the operating system that will catalyze a boost in uptake. But at the same time, the rapidly approaching cut-off date for the availability of Windows XP and the increasing focus of the OEM market on XP's successor mean that consumers will find it increasingly hard to avoid Windows Vista.

Not that adoption has been limping for Vista, according to the Redmond company over the past year. "Windows Vista has become the fastest-selling operating system in history, with more than 100 million licenses sold and counting. If you haven‘t seen Windows Vista yet, it‘s time to give the operating system a look for yourself," reads an invitation from Microsoft in the Vista SP1 Product Guide.

But as with mid-2008 the the market will enter into its "All Vista, All the Time" period, with nowhere for Windows XP to do but down, steering clear of the latest Windows operating system will become nothing short of an art. Sure, there are options, such as Linux, and Apple's Mac OS X, and the ubiquitous XP, soon to become XP SP3, but Vista has yet to grown into its own. And for the time being Windows 7, the next iteration of the Windows platform, scoped for three years after the delivery of Vista, but already beginning to take shape (with Chairman Bill Gates hinting that it might drop as early as 2009) offers absolutely no promise.

Blocking Is No Problem

As far as Windows is concerned there are two types of customers, those that have already made the jump to Windows Vista and those that are yet to embrace the operating system, that is if they manage to resist sudden impulse to buy Vista SP1 after viewing this apex-of-marketing video advertisement. End users will most likely welcome SP1 and implement it immediately, but businesses will not be as fast to apply the service pack. This is why Microsoft permits users to tweak the registry of Vista RTM in such a manner that the operating system will block the delivery of SP1 through Windows Update or Automatic Updates. However, the Windows Service Pack Blocker Tool will not be able to do the same with the installation of the service pack via the standalone packages.

"A blocking tool is available for organizations that would like to temporarily prevent installation of Windows Service Pack updates through Windows Update. This tool can be used with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (valid for 12 months following general availability). The toolkit contains three components. All of them function primarily to set or clear a specific registry key that is used to detect and block download of Windows Service Packs from Windows Update. You only need to use the component which best serves your organization’s computer management infrastructure: a Microsoft-signed executable, a script and an ADM template."

Dodging Vista SP1 with OS X and Linux

There are three clear alternatives to Windows Vista SP1, involving Windows XP, but also rivals Linux and Mac OS X. Apple has made consistent inroads into the territory dominated by original equipment manufacturers, and is making headway against heavyweights such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. In this regard the increased adoption of Mac OS X, Apple's proprietary operating system, comes inherently with the growth of Apple Mac computers. Having reached approximately 8% of the operating system market, according to data made available by Net Applications, Mac OS X is without a doubt the most viable alternative to Windows Vista SP1, taking into consideration strictly Windows' rival platforms.

Linux is the next best thing, although the open source community will advertise its superiority over both Windows and Mac OS X. Still, the general consumers have failed to warm up to the open source operating system, even with the user-friendly Ubuntu from Canonical. In fact, slowly but surely, Ubuntu is positioning itself as the Linux distribution of choice for the public. This is a perspective that hard core Linux users are likely not to share, furthermore demonstrating the Achile's heel of the open source community, the fact that it is a sum of irremediably fragmented units.