The first release candidate for Service Pack 1 of Windows 7 has been around since October, but there's been precious little news of a full fledged launch past vague dates ranging from December 2010 to the first half of 2011. Well, December is obviously come and gone with no luck, but according to a post on TechNet the first Service Pack for Windows 7 has been sent to OEMs.

While Microsoft has nothing official to say on the subject, the fact that companies like Dell, HP, and others will have their hands on SP1 can only mean it will be officially launched in the wild sooner rather than later. There aren't really any life-changing new features coming with SP1; besides the usual bugfixes there will be an improved remote desktop client with RemoteFX integrated as well as dynamic memory support for Windows Server 2008 R2.