Windows Vista service pack 2 beta available December 4
By Jonathan Schlaffer
The final version of Vista SP2 won’t be available until some time next year where April is a likely target date. As a slight surprise Microsoft is releasing a beta of the service pack to anyone willing to test it. Fire up those downloads folks and make sure to be first in line.
MSDN and Technet subscribers should already be able to download it. The rest of us mortals should be able to get our unwashed hands on it Dec. 4 (which is tomorrow as of this writing).
Service Pack 2 is designed for use with both Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The Technet blog highlights a couple new features of Service Pack 2 which are,
The inclusion of Hyper V RTM bits in the Service Pack
Changes to the power profile to yield additional power savings
Microsoft says that it should also improve application compatibility as well as support “new and emerging standards.” Processor support has been improved with 64-bit processors from VIA now being fully compatible with little fuss.
Users who install the service pack will find it comes with its own cleanup tool which “helps restore the hard disk space by permanently deleting the previous versions of the files (RTM and SP1) that are being serviced by SP2.”
Service Pack 2 includes all updates for Vista that have been released to this point as well as including the new features. Installing the service pack without most of your updates will take longer than it would if you already had them installed. Either way you do it, it will take forever to analyze your system to see which updates to install. My guess is the cleanup tool will take just as long.
The beta service pack should not be installed on a system that needs a lot of uptime as there could be some side effects of installing the beta. That’s not going to stop me, how about you?
Look for the service pack to be available for download from Microsoft at some point in the next few days. I’ve learned to add about a day to whatever date the company has set for release of a download.
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Quote: “As a slight surprise Microsoft is releasing a beta of the service pack to anyone willing to test it.”
Microsoft getting users to perform beta testing - yes, that’s a *huge* surprise.
Quote: ‘Microsoft says that it should [...] support “new and emerging standards.”’
I assume that in this context “new” standards are those originating from Redmond, whereas “emerging” ones are those that are in the process of being dealt with by the usual “embrace, extend and extinguish” tactics.
Microsoft might be pathetic, but one has to acknowledge that they certainly are consistent.