Rumour has been circulating these past few weeks that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 is ready and already shipped to OEMs by Microsoft. It all started with a Russian site that claims to have the final RTM build of the first service pack, which was allegedly finished back in November. However, Paul Thurrott of Win Supersite has said that this is actually not the final build and anyone thinking of downloading from a torrent site should err on the side of caution.

Thurrott claims that this is a near-final build and Microsoft will be ready with the finished version very soon. Either way the service pack yields little in the way of benefit for gamers. It’s more a culmination of previously released security updates and minor tweaks:

An updated version of Remote Desktop Services. This is required for a change that is coming in Server 2008 R2 with SP1 (RemoteFX).

Better support for third-party federation services. With this update, Windows 7 now supports services that utilize the WS-Federation passive profile protocol.

Improved HDMI audio device performance. SP1 fixes a bug in Windows 7 where a small percentage of users experienced a disruption of audio over HDMI after a reboot.

Minor XPS document fixes. For the rare case where an XPS document contains both portrait and landscape pages, SP1 fixes a bug that prevented correctly-formatted printing.

Hot-fixes and other bug fixes. Like any service pack, SP1 also contains an aggregation of previously released and new hot-fixes and other bug fixes.

Sneak Peek: A Quick Look at Windows 7 Service Pack 1

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