Windows Vista Service Pack 2 Expected Tomorrow

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."

Comments

Stigma

[FredFredrickson]

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?

Re:Stigma

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Stigma

[Endo13]

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.

Re:Stigma

[conares]

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

Re:Stigma

[FredFredrickson]

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.

Re:Stigma

[bigstrat2003]

I'm not that guy, but I live in Wisconsin, and Vista has been stable for going on 2 years now. I've been using it since release, and it was rock-solid the entire time.

Re:Stigma

[kannibal_klown]

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.

Re:Stigma

[not already in use]

Hah... Also in Wisconsin, and Vista has been rock solid for me as well. Maybe it's all the cheese.

Re:Stigma

[TClevenger]

This isn't "at release." It went to RTM a bit over 2 years ago (11/2006), and went to worldwide release two months later. There has already been a service pack. I recently installed the MS-recommended version of MSN for somebody on a brand new Alienware machine running Home Premium, and the included version of Windows Messenger, a userland app, send the machine into a bluescreen-equivalent reboot cycle, something that userland apps shouldn't be able to do. Recently, it has come to light that there's a vulnerability in the Vista-native "route" command that can crash the system, or worse, allow buffer overflow exploits. This is the safer, more reliable Windows?

Re:Stigma

[Endo13]

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.

Re:Stigma

[Endo13]

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.

Re:Stigma

[squallbsr]

Apparently there isn't enough Cheese In Colorado because my Vista machine does nothing BUT crash (Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 run for months on end).

The longest uptime I got with Vista (Home Premium X64) was 8.5 days. Then an update installed, rebooted and I needed to do a DVD recovery to get it to boot again. It has managed to stay running for 4 hours before bedtime, I guess I'll see if it is still running when I get home...

Re:Stigma

[atamido]

Did I mention not being able to find the network panel? I'm pretty sure I didn't.

I mentioned that I've encountered many issues, and then offer details to two major usability issues (users being unable to deal with wireless networks, and some settings being literally impossible to find in the user interface without third party direction).

I then offer details to a show stopping bug. There are others, but I didn't feel the need to detail every bug I've come across, just to state that there are several serious bugs that haven't been resolved.

Please read more carefully in the future before trying to mock others.

Re:Stigma

[TheNetAvenger]

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.

Ya, no...

1) SP1 and SP2 are yearly updates. Microsoft is back on track to what people remember from the NT4 and Win2K days. (Possible troll view: And they aren't charging $99 a copy for these updates like Apple does, and they have more feature changes than each 10.x update from OS X.)

2) Vista RTM is not bad, the drivers from ATI, Intel, and NVidia were bad, and if you use RTM drivers out of the box for Video, it sucks. However, both Windows Update shoves new drivers to your system or you can grab the latest versions from ATI or NVidia yourself.
(Yes we do internal testing with and without updates, and can say for certain that Vista RTM is faster than XP even for gaming with new video drivers.)

Vista SP1 is bascially a kernel and code update so that it matches Windows 2008, and of course there are going to be some performance and feature improvements.

Vista SP2 is a lighter update focusing on secondary systems that didn't get updates in SP1, like the Bluetooth stack, and features discovered to better handle flaky hardware for things like hibernate/resume(ACPI issues with MBs), and updates to WiFi priorities so that when you open the lid from standby WiFi is already there and going.

So Microsoft giving a SP once a year is normal and it is a good thing for once that MS is actually back on track for consistent updates instead of screwing around.

I think the new Windows Management shows with both the SP1/SP2 timeframes and the work and focus Windows 7 is getting. Tight, reliable and on time are trademarks of the Managers now on Windows and after the Vista series of mis-management structure, MS needed to clean house.

Additional backstory:
There always was a class war inside MS between the NT OS developers and the Win9x developers. And this hit the roof when NT with a bit of RAM was outperforming the assembly optimized Win9x OSes, especially when you consider NT is using a portable C and has several security and structure layers that require more processing than the Win9x OSes did.

This made MS management go WTF x86 people, and it also created a bigger rip when the teams were merged for XP. Vista problems were a bit of a backlash from this merge that occurred in the XP timeframe, from clashing management styles to types and quality of code with regard to features. (Remember Vista V1 of development was started back in 2002, right during the flip over)

Re:Stigma

[pugugly]

Ummm - who said this?

Really - I've been working with Windows for years, and the reaction to XP from both NT users and 98 users was overwhelmingly positive.

Of course, yeah, XP used more memory, but people could see what they were getting in exchange. Vista sucks up memory for very little return that I've noticed.

Pug

Re:Stigma

[ProppaT]

Okay, seriously, is this what /. thinks is funny now? I might as well just start visiting digg.

Re:Stigma

[TheNetAvenger]

I agree with a lot of what you said, but are you serious with point one and OS X?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html

Please show me which service pack made that many changes.

Ok, let's be serious for a second, have you actually read the 300 features list?

In perspective, if MS detailed changes as 'tiny' as Apple does and try to tout them as features, the list for Vista alone would have been over '5000' new features. (We could argue that Apple is smarter about marketing, but they are also conning people by doing this as well.)

Here I will open the link and scroll randomly to the middle and pick some of the 'features' to list and talk about.

(Networking)
- New AirPort Menu
- Self-Tuning TCP

(Parental Controls)
- Simple Account Setup
- Time Limits and Bedtimes
- Activity Logging
- Remote Control & Monitoring
- Dynamic Web Filter
- Web Filter Overrides

Now look at these seriously... They are laughable.

A New AirPort menu is worthy of mentioning as a new feature?
Self tuning TCP is actually one of the few halfway reputable.

Parental Controls, uh? How can they even make this list being serious. These are not 'features' but new 'options' in a dialog box for the Parental Controls.

Now in contrast just to these items ONLY, MS released Vista with features list like this:
Improved Networking
Improved Parental Controls

See how this works? If you are a Fanboi or not paying attention it looks like: MS Vista two Features compared to OS X eight features. It is this level of awareness and poor journalism and poor MS marketing that leaves people thinking this.

For Vista, 'Improved Networking' there are over 200 'detailed' changes in the OS from the self-tuning to the network stack itself being new. 'Parental Controls', there are over 300 features that range from Game Rating restrictions to a new UI for parental controls as well as about 100 policies that can be used.

Ok, so you get an idea of this?

Now you were talking about Service Packs so lets take a look at a couple from the past years. And I will even let you use the 300 features as a goal for OS X here...

XP SP2 was the addition of recompiled and more managed code from the Windows 2003 project. This is why XP SP2 is faster than XP RTM or XP SP1. In this alone there are close to 100 items changes from the core changes applied in SP2.

If we were going to look at XP SP2 and list changes using the 'Apple Method' it would start to look like this really fast:

Networking
- New Taskbar WiFi Menu
- New WiFi Connection Manager
- New Integrated WiFi Authenication systems (WPAv2, etc)
- New WiFi network notification system
- New Firewall with inbound and outbound policies
- Updated TCP connection limitations to fight Spyware
- IPv6 support
- New VPN/IPSEC policies
- New Security Center

On and on and on, and these are just off the top of my head, if I pulled out the item by item changes provided to IT professionals, we could fill pages of 'features', and it would be far more than 300.

Now on to Vista SP1. The entire OS was replaced with the Windows 2008 server build of the binaries. That is a lot of changes, in fact a year's newer OS replaced at the core level.

Here is a link to the 'Overview' of changes, which is a 'light' list as MS 'defines' features/changes. On this page alone there are about 100.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749132.aspx

Now move on to a broader list for IT professions:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618.aspx

You will find about another 300-400 features/changes, and this is more detailed to the level of the crap Apple would list, as they demonstrate from their famous '300 list' you referenced.

A

Beta SP?

[Aladrin]

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

Re:Beta SP?

[Tubal-Cain]

Umm... Beta Testers?

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

Re:Beta SP?

[gmuslera]

Installing Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (Beta) ...
Processing...
Oops, an error was found, there is no C: drive anymore.

See? You install a beta, they remove for you Windows, you install Linux, problems ended. It worked!

Re:Beta SP?

[gEvil (beta)]

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?

Re:Beta SP?

[Hafnia]

I do .... and i bet i'm not alone. My primary function as an engineer is keeping MRI and CT scanners running , i work for a private company with 40 employees. So our total IT staf is 1 full time Administrator and me. I do support and administration in an office of 15 people besides my real job. A lot of firms have this size and don't have the resources to micromanage PC's. Anyway ... we are still on XP and not even beginning to consider Vista , but we might consider Redmonds next offer - by that time i guess we have to phase out XP ... unfortunately !

New Filesystem?

[Tubal-Cain]

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?

Re:New Filesystem?

[Foobar_]

You can copy the two driver files (%systemroot\system32\uexfat.dll and %systemroot%\system32\drivers\exfat.sys) from a Vista installation into the same place in Windows XP or 2003, and by adding a few registry entries (search the web for "exFAT File System Driver", I will not link to random blogs here) you enable full support for it.

This trick works right now with Vista SP1. <tinfoilhat>MS could still disable the drivers from executing on anything lower than Vista in a future update</tinfoilhat> but you should still be able to use the present driver revision to access exFAT on XP/2003.

Re:New Filesystem?

[Curate]

Actually TFA is incorrect. Vista SP2 does NOT add exFAT, as exFAT was already added in Vista SP1.

Nothing new for Media Center

[vivek7006]

It was rumored earlier that they would add tvpack-2008 with SP2, but that's not happening. So no support for un-encrypted QAM, no support for mixing and matching ATSC and QAM channels. Sucks..

Re:Nothing new for Media Center

[BobMcD]

As a user of both, the best new thing for Media Center was probably MythTV. I shudder to imagine going back, and am sorry I resisted the temptation for so long...

Re:Nothing new for Media Center

[Detritus]

ATSC is the standard for digital television broadcasting in the USA. It replaces the old analog system, NTSC. QAM is the standard used by the cable television industry in the USA for digital television and other data transport over coaxial cable.

Re:Nothing new for Media Center

[NJRoadfan]

Too bad the local cable company has started to encrypt all their QAM streams (outside the legally required OTA channels). No more watching your neighbor's on demand programming either.

Re:Nothing new for Media Center

[digitalchinky]

I think your words don't really match whatever it is you are intending to say good sir.

QAM is a modulation method. Quadrature amplitude modulation. It comes in many shapes and patterns, routinely prefixed with a number 8QAM, 16QAM, 256QAM. The higher the number, the higher your information rate. (And usually a higher data rate, depending on FEC and other things) On your bog standard oscilloscope they form what are usually very obvious and sometimes fascinating patterns. It is probably safe to make the assumption that QAM does not have encryption. In all my years on the secret 3 letter agency circuits I've only ever seen static assignments of bits to phase or amplitude change. They can definitely come in unusual head scratching configurations, but static, always.

ATSC covers video, audio, and how it gets encoded pretty comprehensively, but it has very little to do with modulation methods or encryption. The carriers are left free to pump out whatever they want on the spectrum. Obviously some stations will have a governing body that cares enough to restrict them on their use of this radio resource by way of licenses. You can certainly use QAM to encode ATSC compliant transmissions though.

What you may mean is that some carriers like to add their own stupidity in to the mix just to force a vendor lock in as it were. Be this through stupid combinations of FEC, keying speeds, modulation methods (QAM, PSK, FSK, etc), encryption, and so on and so forth. The correction for this might be a simple firmware level tweak to enable the stupid, or it may mean it is simply beyond the capabilities of the system you have. Hard to know without all the geeky details.

Please don't take offence, none was intended :-)

beta

[Anonymous Coward]

The beta is expected tomorrow. The story title forgot that word.

Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fix the misleading title.

Re:I thought everybody on Slashdot

[Farmer Tim]

So why do you guys still tell us about whatever Microsoft is doing?

Because it's not politically correct to point and laugh at slow kids.

At least Google is honest...

[svvampy]

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

Re:Fix the performance problems damnit!

[Cowmonaut]

You sir do not seem to know what you are talking about. I've played around with Vista quite a bit. I still prefer XP on my laptop but that's because I'd rather have my Vista license for my desktop PC. (I don't pirate. If I don't want something I don't buy it.) On my desktop I have 0.2% of my CPU in use with 1.2GB of memory in use when my system is in what *I* consider "idle".

System Specs: Intel Q6600 Quad Core, 8GB DDR2 RAM (Crucial), x2 8800GT w/ 1GB RAM each, XONAR D2X Sound Card, 780i-SLI motherboard. I have currently two 500GB WD hard drives running as a JBOD RAID using SATA.

For applications I have Pidgin (with several chat accounts running) and Steam with full Aero eye candy turned on. A simple static background with the world at night and the Windows Gadgets on the right hand side monitoring my CPU and Memory usage. Typically I have 2-3 browsers open with 5-12 tabs open in each (different reasons). I'm seeding several torrents for various files (all legal) pretty much at all times via uTorrent and I only reboot my PC once a month when I update Vista.

Oh and I have AVAST! running, which I'm about to replace with AVG free again. I keep hearing how they no longer update the definitions in the free version, but I keep getting them on my XP so what the heck, I'll use it until I can't. I really don't like AVAST! as I have to turn it off when playing FarCry2 (causes lag from open file checks that affects my look speeds) but I don't have to turn of AVG.

My CPU usage at idle is at 0.2% and my memory usage is at about 1.2GB. This is according to Process Explorer and Task manager, not the stupid widgits on my desktop (though they say about the same). The usage only goes up when I'm playing a video game.

Before you cry out that there is a lot of memory in use, most of that is being held "ready" for other programs as they require more memory. Vista does that. It is actually a good thing. Just means faster access times for the program.

So yea. I'm positive 98% of all the Vista hate is irrelevant now unless you have 1GB of RAM or less. If you have 2GB and can run DirectX 9 you have no issues with Vista, or shouldn't be. There might be an exception to it:

My laptop came with Vista Home Basic (32-bit). Vista ran like a dog. The laptop specs were not bad (2GB RAM, AMD64 dual core turion, and an ATI video card sharing the system memory) but it was noticeably just bad. I have an OEM of Vista Ultimate x64. I was deciding between throwing XP x64 or Ultimate x64 on the laptop so i tried the Vista Ultimate for 30 days.

I am now certain that whatever Microsoft did to remove "features" such as Remote Desktop and Aero from Vista did more than just remove those features. The performance difference was INCREDIBLE. Vista Ultimate absolutely flew.

To be sure I tried installing Home Basic again. DELL includes OEM install discs now and puts the bloatware and drivers on separate discs. No more image CD/DVDs thankfully. Performance was still noticebly worse when compared to Vista Ultimate x64.

Personally I think they screwed up the registry a bit. Anyone who has made a mistake there knows only a full install ever gets the PC right again afterwords and all sorts of unexpected things happen when stuff goes wrong there. I just don't have any hard proof, but then neither do most people who seem to complain about Vista beyond their PCs only having 1GB or less of RAM.

For the curious I settled on XP x64 on my laptop. Partly because I had the license already and partly because I fell in love with it after using it on my old tower. That's a solid 64-bit OS, and has been since 6 months after its release when the drivers came out for everything.

Re:Fix the performance problems damnit!

[cowwoc2001]

CPU? Who cares about the CPU?!

I was complaining about I/O performance. It's so bad in Vista is drags *everything* down. Windows uses preemptive multitasking so different tasks gets fair access to the CPU. The same can't be said for the hard-drive. All it takes is one rogue process to take down the entire machine by loading like crazy from the HD.

Unfortunately for us, some of the built-in Vista services are exactly such rogue processes.

Take a look at Superfetch and the indexing service. Both are *way* too aggressive! The HD loads for 5-10 minutes on boot-up and anytime you change a file on your hard-drive from that point it will load 5x more than it did under XP.

Vista kills hard-drive performance. Hands down!

This is beta?? BETA??!?!

[swordgeek]

I don't get it. Why are people installing beta software?

Beta should be for beta testers. If a company releases beta software and you're silly enough to install it, you should expect it to run...like beta software. For an OS, that means you should assume it will destroy your system and eat your data. Are you installing this on a disposable "test" machine?

Honestly, Given the sorry quality of released software, I can't understand why people are rushing to blow up their computers with _pre_release software.

Tags

[amliebsch]

Can someone explain why "masturbation" is a tag for this story? Is this an inside joke or something?

Re:Does anyone remember what happened for SP1 Beta

[Achromatic1978]

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.

Windows ain't done till...

[Methlin]

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"?

SP1 and ICS

[k-macjapan]

Prior to SP1 I used ICS to share my connection with my PS3 from my laptops ethernet, due to the fact that wireless speeds from my PS3 are wretched even though my signal is 100%. After 'upgrading' to SP1 I found that the speeds from ICS were worse than the speeds I used to get using the wireless on my PS3.

I doubt SP2 will restore the connection to what it used to be...

Posting this on the off chance that anyone has a solution/work around for either fixing the PS3 wireless or the ICS issue.

Cheers
Kevin

Re:Fix the performance problems damnit!

[adolf]

While I've generally been a big fan of Superfetch and Readyboost, in concept, I can't stand them in practice.

It seems to me, during the 4 times that I've experienced a new Vista install (on three different PCs), that Superfetch really does help for the first few days: Common programs tend to start nearly instantaneously, and the OS seems to mediate disk access much like you suggest. After that, it gets slower and slower. Eventually, it gets so slow that booting and running the computer and starting programs with Superfetch turned off are all faster than keeping it on.

Please note I haven't put much effort into discovering the root cause, and am only reporting the symptoms that I've experienced. YMMV, etc.