I‘ve talked often about Windows Vista SP1. There are many rumors and guesses as to when we can expect it, and now we have more information suggesting it won’t be as long as we might have thought.

Mary Jo Foley, who has a column at ZD Net, says she has inside information that Microsoft will be releasing a beta for Vista SP1 during the week of July 16th. You can expect fixes to help improves some of the reported problems with Vista reliability and performance issues, but don’t expect much in the way of new features. This isn’t surprising as this beta may only be available for four months.

Despite some misleading information related to the recent spat with Google, my earlier predictions of a November release for SP1 are once again on track. Now we don’t know how reliable the information is on either of these dates, but I’m back to thinking that November 30th will be a big day for Vista users.