IMPORTANT NOTES:

First of all, this is the VERSION 6001.18000.080118-1840, as you can see here:



Now, VERY IMPORTANT
If you download this version of Windows Vista x64 Ultimateand then install this release of the official Retail DVD, then:

1. You do NOT have to apply any cracks or activators
2. The service pack will install WITHOUT asking you to validate Windows
3. After install you will still have the GENUINE MICROSOFT SOFTWARE logo in your system's settings



4. You will be able to use the Live Update WITHOUT any problems





ADDITIONAL INFO ABOUT THE SERVICE PACK 1:

Hardware Ecosystem Support and Enhancements

• Adds support for new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) industry standard PC firmware for 64-bit systems with functional parity with legacy BIOS firmware, which allows Windows Vista SP1 to install to GPT format disks, boot and resume from hibernate using UEFI firmware.
• Adds support for x64 EFI network boot.
• Adds support for the 64-bit version of MSDASQL, which acts as a “bridge” from OLEDB to a variety of ODBC drivers thus simplifying application migration from 32-bit platforms to 64-bit Windows Vista.
• Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
• Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
• Adds support for SD Advanced DMA (ADMA) on compliant SD standard host controllers. This new transfer mechanism, which is expected to be supported in SD controllers soon, will improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization.
• Adds support for creating a single DVD media that boots on PCs with either BIOS or EFI.
• Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
• Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs.
• Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
• Enhances Netproj.exe to temporarily resize the desktop to accommodate custom projector resolutions when connecting to Windows Network Projectors.

Application Compatibility Improvements

Since the release of Windows Vista, the ecosystem has made great progress and the number of applications that have the “Works with Windows Vista” and “Certified for Windows Vista” logos has grown to well over 2000.

Thanks to the rich instrumentation capability of Windows Vista, we are able to understand the type of problems that our customers are experiencing (while respecting their personal information and privacy preferences). We use this information to focus improvements in Windows Vista, but we also share this information with our software vendor partners to help improve the reliability and compatibility of 3rd party applications.

It is our goal that applications that run on the Windows Vista Operating System today and are written using public APIs will continue to work as designed on Windows Vista SP1.

Microsoft has already released several application compatibility updates which will allow more applications to work seamlessly for the end user. These will appear in SP1, but are also available via Windows Update. For more information on previous compatibility updates, please refer to July 2007 Windows Vista Application Compatibility Update. SP1 contains additional application compatibility fixes for individual applications.