Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 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: 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.

      --
      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.