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Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Expected Tomorrow

Posted by timothy on from the tomorrow's-tomorrow's-yesterday dept.

arcticstoat writes "After dishing out a few copies of the beta of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to select customers in October, Microsoft has now decided to let the general public get their hands on the beta of the service pack, starting from tomorrow. The beta of the service pack will be made available via Microsoft's Customer Preview Program on 4 December, and it includes all the updates since Service Pack 1, as well as a few other bits and pieces. Most notably, Microsoft says that Service Pack 2 'improves performance for Wi-Fi connection after resuming from sleep mode,' and adds the Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, ID strings for VIA's Nano CPU and support for the exFAT file system for large flash devices."

16 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Stigma by FredFredrickson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Trying to cash in on XP sp2's stigma, they're pushing vista as an aged operating system, that's been through the ropes. Now we've got a mature system, unlike that horrible old Vista RTM, that didn't do well.

    Have no fear! SP2 is here! Really, though. It's safe now! It's the standard!

    Guys? Guys? Is anybody listening?

    --
    Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
    1. Re:Stigma by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      vista has been stable (relative to XP) for a few months now, where have u been?

    2. Re:Stigma by Endo13 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have to disagree. SP1 really did make some big improvements, at least as many as SP1 did for WinXP. Yes, Vista has its problems. But show me one version of Windows that didn't have any at release. Obviously it's not as mature and smooth-running as XP yet, but it's getting there, and a lot faster than XP did.

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    3. Re:Stigma by FredFredrickson · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I dunno. I run vista. I have yet to see even close to the same performance that I did with xp. Oh hang on a second, I have to restart 3 programs that mysteriously went "white," and then reset the video subsystem timeout so it doesn't crash next time I load a game.

      I don't think sp2 will fix these issues. A 3 mb file copy is still as long as a 300mb file copy in xp for me.

      --
      Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
    4. Re:Stigma by kannibal_klown · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why dont you just tell the rest of us where you are?

      NOTE: the following is purely anecdotal.

      I made the leap 1-2 months ago. I have Vista 32-bit as a secondary OS on my MacBook Pro for some Windows coding I have to do on occasion, and I lost my old XP CDs some time ago.

      The first day I installed it I had a blue screen when my laptop tried going to sleep, so I disabled the auto-sleep feature. Then a few days/weeks later RedAlert 3 crashed on me shortly after I installed it, and before I patched it.

      Save for those 2 incidents Vista has been running stable on my machine. Granted I'm not on it 24/7 but it's been OK.

      Whether I'm getting a performance hit, I cannot say. But stability is OK.

    5. Re:Stigma by Endo13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I dunno. I run vista. I have yet to see even close to the same performance that I did with xp.

      And that's exactly the same thing people said about winXP when they compared it to Win98. Win98 needed a whopping 128MB of ram to run well, 256MB was the most you needed for, well pretty much anything. Then WinXP came out with a minimum requirement of 128MB, and everyone complained about it. Understandably so, because as any relatively savvy person now knows, 128MB as a "minimum requirement" for XP means all the eye candy and special features turned off running exactly one program at a time with no strictly essential background processes running. Antivirus is not an exception. In fact, 1GB is generally the minimum you want for XP to work well for normal use. That's eight times the original minimum requirements. I'd wager if you put 8x the minimum required memory in your Vista box, you'll get all the performance you could wish for.

      That said, don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge Vista fan. I use it at work, but my home computers still run XP. I'll be the first to admit Vista is still going through some growing pains. But it's not as bad as the sensationalists want you to think, and it's come a lot farther in the same time span than WinXP did after it was released.

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    6. Re:Stigma by Endo13 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And they're still fixing those kinds of bugs in WinXP, which has been out 7 years now. It's quite fair to say that Vista with SP1 is in better shape than XP was with its SP1.

      This is the safer, more reliable Windows?

      Come on. Don't embarrass yourself. Everyone on /. knows you don't run Windows for safety and reliability.

      --
      There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
  2. Beta SP? by Aladrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who is crazy enough to install a beta Microsoft service pack?

    --
    "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    1. Re:Beta SP? by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Umm... Beta Testers?

      And admins that want to find out how strongly they want to discourage installation by the users on release day.

    2. Re:Beta SP? by gEvil+(beta) · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And admins that want to find out how strongly they want to discourage installation by the users on release day.

      What kind of admin lets their users install Service Packs on their own?

      --
      This guy's the limit!
  3. New Filesystem? by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 2, Insightful

    OK, so they have added a new filesystem for external flash drives...
    What about filesystems for the C: drive? It's not like using other filesystems will allow so much interoperability that it encourages switching away from Windows.
    So what's wrong? The NIH-syndrome?

    1. Re:New Filesystem? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      What about Linux? =/

  4. Please? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fix the misleading title.

  5. At least Google is honest... by svvampy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...about their products that are in beta for lengthy periods.

  6. Re:Does anyone remember what happened for SP1 Beta by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Stop the presses, everyone, a real world expert, ravepunk, has spoken, and he is putting his foot DOWN. No-one in his company will be installing the beta of SP2 after his horrible experiences with the first SP beta, because he had to re-install machines to upgrade to SP1 fin... wait, what? You're the decision maker for a company in this regard, and you decided to place a beta service pack for something as fundamental as the operating system on actively in-use machines, and were shocked to find that there maybe have been changes between the beta and production release that couldn't easily be reverted? I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that you expect "upgrade path" trouble-free beta installs of an OS, or that perhaps you don't have a test machine/network/virtualization and felt compelled to install this on production machines, or that seemingly you think your actions played no responsibility in any of the above.

  7. Windows ain't done till... by Methlin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Used to be "Windows ain't done 'til SP1", then XP broke that and Vista followed suit. Question now is is Vista "done" like XP was with SP2 or will it be "Vista ain't for me 'til SP3"?