Last Monday Microsoft announced that it had released Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) to manufacturing. But wait! Don't go looking for it just yet! Microsoft also announced that it would still take till mid-March before SP1 would be available to consumers. The reason for this delay is that SP1 is not ready.

OK, this sounds a little silly, so let's listen to what Microsoft's Mike Nash, Corporate Vice President; Windows Product Management had to say:

"Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers. These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices. Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers. While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available."

"While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers. To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers. As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don't have any of the affected device drivers installed. We're taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible."

The Release To Manufacturing (RTM) at this stage allows computer manufacturers to start producing new PCs with Vista SP1 pre-installed, and it will allow Microsoft to start producing Vista SP1 DVD's.

So by mid-March the stand-alone installer should be available for download, but it will be massive: around 550MB. Around mid-April users who have set Vista to automatically download and install high-priority updates will receive the service pack, except for those with the affected device drivers.

Microsoft has not publicly identified which drives are causing problems with SP1.

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