Beta testers are an unruly bunch that rarely adheres to the rules. MS beta testers are the worst and it’s quite evident with the premature release of the Vista Performance and Reliability Pack and Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack that officially launch August 14. The quasi service packs are said to fix a handful of bugs reported through the Error Reporting Service and product support. Maybe I’ll fire up that Vista laptop now, but downloading unauthorized software is wrong, so tell me how it is.
Make sure you have 7-zip so you can uncompress the files.
Vista Performance and Reliability Pack Unofficial Release [Neowin]
wohoho
Wrong, wrong, wrong! It has been widely reported (see Mary Jo) that the leaked beta fixes are not in fact SP1, nor is there any indication that they will become part of SP1, even if they fix some things that were announced to be included in SP1. These bits are beta versions of fixes like the hundreds of beta packages Microsoft has been testing before. I used to be a beta tester for them but stopped doing it at some point because the installing/uninstalling/updating all the time became too tedious.
It is fuzzy reporting like this that makes people believe SP1 is just around the corner. Don’t take this for more than what it is: Beta packages for hot fixes like any other security hot fix from Microsoft.