Windows Vista's first major upgrade is set for January

On Wednesday Microsoft finally put out details of Service Pack 1, the long-awaited first major upgrade of the operating system that the company released in January. SP1, as it's known, will be available to the public in January 2008; the 50 MB upgrade will come to Vista users as a download.

In addition to security upgrades, David Zipkin, an MS product manager, tells the Seattle Post Intelligencer's Todd Bishop that the upgrade will fix Vista's slow copying and unzipping of files, and address delays people experience when they resume their machines from hibernation (which, in my experience, has long been a primary Windows failure). The upgrade will also let Vista handle external drives formatted in something called exFat.

Microsoft is also going to put out another service pack for Windows XP, the third since that last-generation OS debuted in 2001. It will be the last major revision of XP. After that, say goodbye.