For the second time in two months, Microsoft has rolled out fixes to improve Windows Vista's speed and reliability.

The four separate updates, available now for download from the vendor's Web site, address several operating system performance and stability problems, deal with a dozen Universal Serial Bus issues, improve Windows Media Player, and patch Media Center.

Although Microsoft has put Windows Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1) in the hands of some testers, it has said it will continue to update the original Vista -- dubbed "RTM" for "release to manufacturing" -- even as it puts SP1 through its paces. Seven weeks ago, it issued a pair of updates that tackled numerous problems, offering them as optional items through Windows Update last month.

"[Tuesday's] updates are a collection of fixes that we have made to address a small set of reliability, compatibility, stability, security, and performance issues," a Microsoft spokeswoman said Wednesday. "[They] will provide incremental improvements to the most common issues -- but in general, these improvements or fixes are going to be very narrow in scope."

The widest ranging of yesterday's quartet was a 5.4MB update for multiple hardware and operating system issues that Microsoft said extends laptop battery life, improves the stability of wireless network connections, and deals with compatibility problems with some antivirus software.

Interestingly, the update also promised to shorten Vista start-up and resume-from-sleep times, problems that Microsoft had supposedly fixed with the August patches. Vista users have complained about Vista's slow start-up, shutdown and return from power-saving modes since at least April.

A second update, detailed in the KB941600 support document, is a cumulative roll-up of 12 fixes to Vista's USB components. In Microsoft's terminology, a "roll-up" is a collection of patches, similar to a service pack, but not tested as extensively. A similar cumulative update for Media Center is also available from the Microsoft download site; it deals with several specific problems, including some involving how Vista interacts with Microsoft Xbox 360 video game consoles.

The fourth update patches Windows Media Player 11, the default audio- and video-playing software included with the operating system. Microsoft offered few details -- a support document has not been added to the database -- but the company's spokeswoman said that the 8.8MB download for the 32-bit version of Vista "eliminates corruption of Media Player database in certain scenarios and of media stream in certain scenarios."

The updates will be distributed via Windows Update "in the near future," the spokeswoman added, but as in August, she would not pin them to a date. Microsoft's next scheduled Windows Update releases are due out next Tuesday.

Microsoft has aggressively promoted its ability to update Vista through Windows Update, even going so far as denying after Vista's launch that it needed to produce a comprehensive service pack, or SP1. It has continued to claim that most issues can be addressed by Windows Update.

Mike Nash, the Microsoft executive who leads Windows product management, was the latest to brag about Windows Update's prowess in keeping Vista running smoothly. "The really important updates we can release with Windows Update, and the need for a service pack is actually reduced," he said.

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