There have been enough problems with the Service Pack 1 update for Windows Vista that Microsoft is offering free tech support to anyone having problems, company representatives said on the official Vista blog.

A new SP1-specific support site says the free, unlimited support is available until March 18, 2009. The site offers e-mail, chat and phone support. As of this writing, the site was reporting one-day delays for e-mail responses and an 18-minute delay for chat responses.

The hours for chat are 5 a.m. to midnight Pacific time weekdays and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends. Phone support, at (866) 234-6020 is 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays and 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekends.

University Says No

The free support is apparently a response to widespread problems users have experienced in installing SP1. And just as with adoption of Vista itself, some enterprises are showing resistance to installing the major update.

The University of Pennsylvania is advising faculty and staff not to install SP1. The school’s IT department said it will support Vista SP1 when it comes preinstalled on new systems, but “strongly recommends that all other users adopt a ‘wait and see’ attitude” toward updating, according to a university bulletin Friday.

Penn users should continue “to use previous versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista until after the initial bugs in SP1 are identified and fixed,” the department said.

“Now that SP1 is available, I expect more and more companies to begin moving to Vista,” said Charles King, princpal analyst with Pund-IT, in an e-mail. “However, given its complexity (compared to XP with a new kernel, security features, and user interface), I expect vendors and others will also provide a number of Vista migration services, particularly for companies with hundreds or thousands of PCs.”

Widespread Problems

Meanwhile, Vista users are angrily reporting on Microsoft blogs…

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