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The company has released a A 17-page document which highlights the many changes SP1 will make to Vista.

Copying files should be considerably faster under SP1, says Microsoft. Duplicating files on the same disk should take 25% less time, and copying files from a remote system has been accelerated by up to half.

An unusual quirk with Vista, where copying a set of files immediately after deleting another causes delays, has also been resolved with

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the update, claims Microsoft.

The installation process for the release candidate will also be more efficient. It now removes the massive 1GB of unneeded files that the previous beta version left on the hard disk. The size of the installer has also been significantly reduced, with the all-language version being half the size of the previous beta.

Not all of the improvements relate to speed, though. Several small improvements to energy saving features could represent significant energy savings for large companies.

Additionally, support for Direct3D 10.1 will enable programmers to make better use of new graphics cards and exFAT will support larger drives and files.

Despite these performance claims, users who install SP1 may notice a significant drop in performance initially. The installation overwrites some optimisation files, which will take "a few hours or days" to retrain.

Microsoft says in a blog post that the final version of SP1 should be ready for release in the first quarter of 2008.