Microsoft on Thursday accidentally released the first service pack (SP1) for Windows Vista to a group of users who were not supposed to receive the update until mid-March.
"Yesterday, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group," Microsoft said in a statement.
Vista made its consumer debut in January 2007, and SP1 marks the first major upgrade to the operating system. Microsoft released details about SP1 in August, and opened it to a moderately-sized audience for testing in the weeks thereafter. It was released to manufacturing earlier this month, but Microsoft said it would not release SP1 to Windows Update or the Microsoft.com download center until mid-March.
Several users running the 64-bit version of Vista were surprised, therefore, to see that SP1 was available on Thursday. But that version "was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC," Microsoft said.
At this point, the company is "still planning to make SP1 broadly available in the mid-March timeframe."
The release is the second SP1 snafu for Microsoft in the past several days. In a Tuesday blog post, Microsoft reported that a number of users were having problems resulting from the service pack prerequisite KB937287.
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