Windows Vista Service Pack 2 released tomorrow

Posted at: 5:32pm 3rd December 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Service Pack BETA will be made available to public via Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program

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.

On The Windows Blog Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Mike Nash, revealed that the BETA of Service Pack 2 will be made available through Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program (CPP) via Technet from 4 December. Nash explained that the CPP ‘is intended for technology enthusiasts, developers, and IT Pros who would like to test Service Pack 2 in their environments and with their applications prior to final release.’

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 will include all of the updates since Service Pack 1 was released in March, and it will also contain a few other features. Most notably, Microsoft claims that it ‘improves performance for Wi-Fi connection after resuming from sleep mode,’ which will be good news to anyone who’s suffered the frustration of a dropped WiFi connection after resuming from Sleep mode. The pack also adds ID and vendor strings for VIA’s 64-bit Nano CPU, and the Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack.

As well as this, Microsoft says that SP2 will add support for the exFAT file system for large flash memory devices, and that the RSS gadget in the Windows Sidebar will be more responsive. You can find more detail on the improvements in Service Pack 2 at the Notable Changes document here.

Will you be updating to the BETA of Windows Vista Service Pack 2, or are you going to wait for the official release? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.