Having long taken the position that there are many things which need to be fixed in Vista, I'm happy to see Microsoft is at work on a beta of Service Pack 1 for Vista. On the other hand, an examination of Redmond's documentation reveals that there may some significant shortfalls when SP1 ships in early 2008.As Microsoft explains in on their Vista Team Blog:

SP1 will contain changes focused on addressing specific reliability and performance issues we've identified via customer feedback, supporting new types of hardware, and adding support for several emerging standards. SP1 also makes additional improvements to the IT administration experience. We didn't design SP1 as a vehicle for releasing new features; however, some existing components do gain enhanced functionality in SP1.

While those words might warm the cockles of a sysadmin's heart, they won't do much for consumers looking for fixes for the OS's lingering annoyances. I might point out that it's those consumers who currently constitute Vista's main user base; enterprises have been slow to move off of Windows XP, mainly because of the extra hardware expense--more memory and a better graphics card--required by Vista-capable systems.

In fairness, consumers aren't being left out in the cold. Buried amid a Vista white paper are lots of welcome details, which put some meat on the bones of Microsoft's promises.

I've extracted the following items from the white paper, which are improvements Microsoft will fold into SP1, as things that Vista users have been crying out for, for a long time: