If you installed a previous pre-sp1 Vista service pack, you must uninstall it first.  The release is here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=529d992a-d69e-4c73-9213-7a7f3852c0ca&displaylang=en&tm 

Did you know Vista has a built-in tool for screen shots?  Go to start and start to type “snipping”:  

Microsoft has quietly released a RC build of Vista SP1 to the public.  You can get it here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsvista/bb738089.aspx  I installed it and did notice a small performance increase overall, but boot time seems longer.  I had a “Crash” a few days later where my screen was black and only the cursor was shown.  I had to reboot to clear the problem, but other than that it seems an improvement.  Again, I suggest waiting for the official release.  Note that according to the readme you will have to uninstall this RC1 before installing the final release.  The install took about an hour(!) to complete.   One of the benefits is that if you have a system that is not activated, it will allow you to continue to use the OS, but will nag all the time instead of putting you into a reduced access mode.

(updated with screen shot)

I was happy to see that sp1 was available for Office 2007, as typically office patches are tested well.  So far I’ve been very unhappy with the stability of Outlook 2007 after sp1.  I constantly have “painting errors” where outlook’s task bar on the bottom of the screen is shown on top of my quick launch bar. I move my mouse over it and the quick-launch icons are painted properly, however, whenever this happens I am no longer able to pull up the outlook window.  Vista shows the animation of minimize & restore, but no window is ever shown.   The only way to recover is to right-click on the task-bar and select close.   It happens 1+ times a day, which makes it incredibly annoying.  Prior to sp1 this never happened.   I’ve seen two other problems, but they happened only once each.  I found another article talking about another known problem with no fix: http://techlogg.com/content/view/468/

SMS trace tool allows you to merge multiple files which are sorted by time stamps?

Go to the open file dialogue box and alt-select multiple files, then check “merge selected files”

You can configure Outlook to pull your email for a Gmail email address, but I experienced some slowness during the process.  I found a blog that described a few things you can do to speed it up.  http://www.labnol.org/software/tutorials/solutions-for-slow-gmail-imap-with-microsoft-outlook/1761/