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The company is hoping that SP1 will give the operating system a much needed boost, and is traditionally a key milestone for business users, who wait for the early bugs to be ironed out before deploying a new OS.

Microsoft claims that SP1 will bring a series of performance enhancements,

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including improving the speed at which files are copied and transfered, as well as improved reliability and new energy saving enhancements.

However, the company warns that installing SP1 may cause a significant drop in performance initially, as the installation overwrites some optimisation files, which will take "a few hours or days" to retrain.

Vista SP1 RC is available to download from the Microsoft site, although the download failed to start in our early morning tests, presumably as the weight of demand hangs heavy on Microsoft's servers.

It's the second Service Pack Microsoft has released in as many days, with Service Pack 1 for Office 2007 arriving yesterday.