Nick White announced today on the Windows Vista Blog that the beta of Windows Vista SP1 would be available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers within a few weeks. He went on to say that the final version is expected to ship no sooner than the first quarter of 2008, so my prediction of November 30th is out the window!

What can you expect Vista’s SP1 to contain? Here’s how Nick describes it:

In addition to updates we’ve previously released, 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.

In a white paper called Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Beta White Paper, Brandon LeBlanc goes into more detail. The standalone service pack will weigh in at roughly 1GB for the x86 version, and will require 7 GB of freespace for x86 and 12 GB for x64 just for the install to happen (most of this will be returned after the install finishes). Besides the standalone version, users will also have the option to do an express install, which only downloads the required pieces for that specific computer, or a slipstream version which embeds the updates into the original Vista image.

Though the focus of the service pack is to increase reliability and performance, some enhancements will also be included. Among them, you’ll find:

• Support for the exFAT file system
• Support for Secure Digital (SD) Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
• x64 PCs can boot using Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)
• Support for Direct3D 10.1
• Support for Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol (SSTP)
• Ability to use BitLocker Drive Encryption on volumes other than C:
• Better control over the Disk Defragmenter
• The Network Diagnostics tool will help troubleshoot network file sharing issues
• An improved method of working with GPO’s through GPEdit.msc instead of GPMC