After lots of wavering, Microsoft has finally made the due date for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) official: The update will ship in the latter half of 2007. Microsoft didn’t issue a press release with that pronouncement. Instead, it notified its Technology Adoption Partner testers of it via an e-mail regarding the imminent start of the Vista SP1 testing program.

Microsoft hasn’t released details of exactly what changes will be wrought in Vista SP1, which has been assigned the codename ‘Fiji’ but some OS components which missed the RTM cut-off will almost certainly be rolled into the update.

If Vista SP1 scrapes in by December 2007 it will have been 11 months since the OS itself debuted — the same length of time it took for Windows XP to get its first service pack. However, Microsoft is almost certainly aiming for a much earlier arrival, perhaps to overcome the reluctance among consumers and businesses alike to plunge headfirst into Vista. This is most often espoused in the conventional Windows wisdom which suggests waiting until Service Pack 1 ships.

[Via Zdnet]