According to the Vista Team blog (link):
"Today we are excited to announce that we have released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese)."

Are they going to force the upgarde on folks automatically?

I doubt they will have too. Most of the people I have run into who use Vista are reasonably desperate for any way to make it more stable and not so slow.

Heh, I was just commenting the other day on how much faster my Vista machine is than my old XP machine.

Of course, I just went from 3Ghz single to 2Ghz dual core :-)

One of my laptops is a Windows XP Home SP2 single core Pentium M 2.0GHz with 1GB of RAM.

I recently bought a family member a Windows Vista Home Premium Core2Duo 2.0GHz dual core laptop with 2GB of RAM.

The Windows XP single core laptop with only 1GB of RAM is meaningfully faster. The dual core 2.0GHz laptop with 2GB of RAM isn't slow, but the 3 year old lappy DOES feel faster in Windows.

I downloaded this using BT yesterday (434MB!) and installed it. Took forever to install (up to an hour is no lie) but have not seen any problems since. Well, I take that back, the latest Conexant HD Audio driver will not install on my laptop now (the freebie Compaq F572US Staples deal) but otherwise it works fine. Seems to use less CPU at idle and network file copies are definitely faster. Have not tried to print to XP yet, this was my biggest complaint with original Vista - it took FOREVER to network print to my XP server.

So far so good, but Vista is still mostly a wasted upgrade from XP IMO. There's just no compelling reason to jump unless you have new hardware that's not supported in XP. And there's way too many downsides to Vista even with SP1.

Mossberg reviewed SP1 and stated that there wasn't really anything great in it. Most people wouldn't notice any real difference. (Link)

I like Vista, but the big problem is that it sounds like i would get a lot more performance out of my system by running XP with SP3.

I'll be trying out Vista SP1, but if it's not a big enough change i'll probably start using XP again on my main desktop.

I switched from Vista to XP and am very, very happy I did. Vista was driving me nuts. Now when I sit down at a system with Vista the first thing that enters my mind is "ahh crap". I look upon it as I would Windows ME.

I certainly hope Vista improves and my opinion changes, but for now I basically recommend XP over Vista. This comes from experience after using Vista on my main desktop for about a year.

Well I'm giving in and splitting the partition on my notebook to install XP MCE. Vista SP1 did not fix the slow network print problem to XP (it actually seems to be worse now), and will STILL not save my password after reboot when connecting to a Samba share on my Myth box.

There's just too many (little, but stupid) things to put up with on Vista, and it's easier to dual-boot into an OS that just works without fuss.