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Microsoft’s General Manager of Windows Commercial Product Marketing, Rich Reynolds, has let slip that the company is planning to release Windows 7 SP1 in the first quarter of 2011.

Microsoft officials have previously said that the final version of Windows 7 SP1 would be ready in the “first half” of 2011. In a blog post, entiled Windows 7 Momentum and Customer Guidance, Reynolds states that the company recently delivered the Release Candidate build “with the final version available in first quarter of calendar year 2011.” Microsoft’s official service packs website still features the text “first half of 2011.”

SP1 will include RemoteFX which provides rich 3-D graphical experience for remote users. The service pack also will include a series of incremental updates, previously released on Windows Update for both Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

RemoteFX is a new enhancement to RDP’s graphical remoting capabilities. The idea behind RemoteFX is to allow for a full remote experiences including multiple displays, Aero and multimedia streaming to all types of client devices including low cost thin clients. RemoteFX achieves this by using a technique known as host-based rendering. This technique allows for the final screen image to be rendered locally on the remote PC after being compressed and sent down to that remote host. The enhancements are expected to greatly improve video streaming across remote sessions which is currently one of the major drawbacks of virtualized computing.

Windows 7 recently celebrated its first birthday after selling over 240 million licenses in the first year of sales.

By Tom Warren

www.winrumors.com