Microsoft announced on Wednesday that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was “released to manufacturing” which means it has been tested and it is ready for the general public to use and will soon be available to download. So what does this mean for you as a gamer? Well at this point absolutely nothing unless you are doing a reinstall of Windows 7 on your system then it should make it go a little quicker on the updating side of things.
With previous versions of Windows like Windows Vista or Windows XP we kind of got used to a Service Pack coming out with new features or vast performance improvements – however with Windows 7 it is actually a very feature rich and solid performing operating system and therefore for the Windows 7 side of things for Service Pack 1 it is really only a few minor feature fixes and otherwise just what a Service Pack should be – one big all inclusive update of all previous security fixes and updates since the operating system released. There could possibly be some performance improvements but for those test results we will have to wait for the final build to come out and for the PC enthusiast websites to do their benchmarks comparing the new Windows 7 SP1.
For more information on what exactly is all included in the Windows 7 SP1 / Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 update (both the client operating system and server operating system come from the same mold so to speak so they get the same update) I will direct you to a guy that knows a lot about Windows and a lot about Microsoft in general; Mr. Paul Thurrot at the [fancy_link link=”http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows-7/Sneak-Peek-A-Quick-Look-at-Windows-7-Service-Pack-1.aspx” target=”_blank”]Supersite for Windows[/fancy_link] where he did a writeup of the Service Pack back in January.
Service Pack 1 will become available publicly on February 22, via Windows Update, through manual downloads, and pre-installed on new PCs and servers.