Vista Service Pack 2 release may be pushed back
Vista’s second Service Pack will reportedly be released a month or two after its originally rumored release. The change appears to be down to an extra step in the development procedure.
TechARP, the site which first reported April as the target date for a release to manufacturing (when the software is given in finished form to hardware producers) now says Microsoft sources are pegging it simply as the second quarter – that is, some time before the end of June.
The beta edition is of course already out. The original reported schedule saw a release candidate set for February with a release to manufacturing following in April. A release candidate is a version of the software which is theoretically ready to be the finished product and would only change if late testing found serious errors.
The new schedule puts the release candidate back to March, with February seeing an extra stage titled ‘release candidate escrow build’. There doesn’t seem a clearly defined industry distinction between this term and a plain ‘release candidate’: both are stages where developers are no longer looking to improve the software and are simply trying to hunt down any unacceptable problems.
It wouldn’t be entirely fair to call this rumored change of schedule a ‘delay’: after all, the April date was never officially confirmed. Even assuming the reports are correct, the revised schedule still calls for the fundamentals to be finished by February, so the change would be less to do with any negative feedback to the beta release and more to do with wanting an extra stage of testing to weed out any bugs.
The only significant loss to Microsoft if the schedule is indeed put back would be that SP2 wouldn’t be released before the company’s half-year profits come out at the end of April. A release – pitched as proof that the firm was still committed to Vista – would have been useful to refer to if the company needed to have some good news to placate shareholders. However, it’s extremely likely that Microsoft will still at the least be in a position to announce a confirmed release date at that point which could be just as effective.
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January 21st, 2009
At least MSFT is waiting to get Vista SP2 right, unlike the last time with the XP SP3 fiasco.
But seriously, does anyone care about Vista anymore?
If Microsoft wants good news to placate shareholders, they have it….Windows 7 Beta has received good reviews all over the spectrum.
I kinda get the feeling MSFT is saying, “here is SP2″ for Vista…”good riddance”.
May 6th, 2009
I find vista an excellent operating system,
I use xp for some older apps (and xp on my old laptop)
but set up correctly it is superb and very stable.
just remove the junk like ‘uac’ and ‘defender’.
lookinf forward to W7.
May 6th, 2009
I find vista an excellent operating system,
I use xp for some older apps (and xp on my old laptop)
but set up correctly it is superb and very stable.
just remove the junk like ‘uac’ and ‘defender’.
looking forward to W7.
July 27th, 2009
Well, they may have tried to get things right, but they still screwed up. After installing SP2, I could no longer print to a Canon MX850 over either USB or network. SP2 did not reduce the resource requirements and its still an extremely slow OS. I’ve tried Windows 7 on both a desktop and laptop and went back to Vista because Windows introduced a whole new set of problems on both of them. Gawd, I am so tired of Microsoft and their defective fixes.