Microsoft has officially confirmed that a Release Candidate of Vista SP1 (build 6001.17052.071129-2315) will be available for download next week, but they haven’t mentioned the exact date maybe for some curiosity.

Sources say it should be on Tuesday , December 11th which is likely to happen as it coincides with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday. Today MSDN and TechNet subscribers will be able to download Vista SP1 RC , yesterday Microsoft Connect had the chance to grab it.

Major difference from the beta stage is the 30% reduction of the SP1 installer, besides it will occupy lesser amount of space. But there is a catch, if you have download and install the Vista SP1 Release Candidate you will have to uninstall before installing the full release. So make sure you take this into consideration before jumping into the bandwagon.

Here is the list of improvements which I hope so will make atleast the games should run.

Reliability improvements:

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Windows Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Improved Windows Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from Windows XP to Windows Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Windows Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Performance improvements:

• Improves the speed of copying and extracting files.
• Improves the time to become active from Hibernate and Resume modes.
• Improves the performance of domain-joined PCs when operating off the domain; in the current release version of Windows Vista, users would experience long delays when opening the File dialog box.
• Improves performance of Windows Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista, reducing CPU utilization and speeding JavaScript parsing.
• Improves battery life by reducing CPU utilization by not redrawing the screen as frequently, on certain computers.
• Improves the logon experience by removing the occasional 10-second delay between pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and the password prompt displaying.
• Addresses an issue in the current version of Windows Vista that makes browsing network file shares consume significant bandwidth and not perform as fast as expected.