Thursday, May 28, 2009

Windows Vista SP2 now available

Although most of us are waiting for Microsoft to release Windows 7, the software giant is still hard at work maintaining the current versions of Windows; namely Vista and Server 2008.

Today it has made Service Pack 2 available for download after a fairly lengthy beta period – we first looked SP2 performance back in December last year and we found very little difference between SP1 and the SP2 beta.

Microsoft posted some important ‘things to know’ about the Service Pack last month, where it says to uninstall any beta versions of the Service Pack before installing the RTM version and also noted that if you’ve used ‘vLite’ to customise your Vista install, you may have removed components that prevent SP2 from installing.

There is a workaround, though, which Microsoft has detailed in this entry on its knowledge base.

Another important thing to note is that the beta version of the Service Pack is time limited and will expire on 1st June 2010 – if you have a beta version installed, Microsoft strongly recommends upgrading before that deadline.

Additional Vista SP2 Updates

Besides Blu-ray and Bluetooth support, Vista SP2 also:

* Fixes Wi-Fi issues when Vista awakes from sleep mode.

* Improves performance of Vista desktop sidebar gadget, allowing for RSS feeds to perform better.

* Address overall Vista system performance issues. Microsoft says SP2 repairs nearly 700 nagging Vista bugs and security updates.

* Boosts power management efficiency by 10 percent.

* Gives your computer support for VIA Technologies' new 64-bit CPU

* Lets your system support exFAT, which can handle larger files and can also use UTC timestamps so you can synchronize files across different time zones.

Unified installers for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista and Server 2008 are available – grab them from the links below if you’re still running Vista.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/935791