Microsoft has quietly launched a hotfix for Vista graphic’s memory overflows. What is that? I hear you ask? When sometimes you play a game, you get interrupted with this dreaded ‘Out of Memory’ errors, then it’s due to the way Vista manages memory allocation when a game is being played.

How did this bug happen? The hard limit for a physical address space on a 32 bit computer is approximately 4 billion. In Vista, 2 billion is reserved for applications and the remaining 2 billion is reserved for the OS. Now, It appears a bug in Vista that handles the virtualized graphics card memory fills up this storage space quickly. As a result, you get the ‘out of memory’ error. To read more, please visit ArsTechnica’s article here.

The second news of interest, is that earlier today, Microsoft will most likely ship Service Package 1 of Windows Vista sometime by the end of the year. This potential date was floated by ArsTechnica. According to them, SP1 will be released to MSDN and Technet subscriber over the coming weeks.

A White Paper on Vista SP1 has also been released at Microsoft’s Window’s Vista Team Blog page. You can view it here.

One thing did catch my attention on SP1, It’s a minor one after the installation has completed, but if you’re low on disk space(highly unlikely unless you’ve been filling up your computer to the brim since you bought it in January, then free roughly 8 gb so that the installation of SP1 can finish smoothly. Why? Just look at the snippet below.

Installing the service pack will require a large amount of free disk space (7 GB for x86 and 12 GB for x64). However, most of this space will be reclaimed after installation