Vista SP2 is out, anyone using it?

[Sand & Mercury]

Downloading this baby now. Here's hoping it'll free up some RAM when it's done.

[Wiebelhaus]

Provide official link please , Betanews nor technet have anything on it that I can find.

[Sand & Mercury]

I downloaded it through Windows Update.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/05/service-pack-2-for-vista-and-server-2008-finally-available.ars < This article gives you some official download links I see, and a good run down of what's changed.

[markvdm]

I updated via Windows Update and it loaded SP2. To be honest I don't notice that much difference, maybe slightly faster, but RAM usage is still way up there. I'm trying to switch over to Ubuntu 9.04 to give that a whirl, but got a weird Internet issue...

[Joeb454]

I got it through on Windows Update yesterday on a laptop, and I downloaded it on my Desktop as soon as I saw it was out (about a month ago I think).

That said, I'm never in Windows enough to care too much ;)

[FuturePilot]

I installed it, but I really didn't notice any difference.



That said, I'm never in Windows enough to care too much ;)

This ^

[Wiebelhaus]

Thanks.

[Firestem4]

The b**ch is that they're [Microsoft] not going to do anything that makes vista better because Microsoft wants you to purchase Windows 7 when its released...Why would we get 7 if Vista is better [now] than it was with SP2?

[Tipped OuT]

The b**ch is that they're [Microsoft] not going to do anything that makes vista better because Microsoft wants you to purchase Windows 7 when its released...Why would we get 7 if Vista is better [now] than it was with SP2?

What? Because all of the bugs from Vista and problems are fixed in Windows 7. Also, you can get Windows 7 for free at the moment, just download it from Microsoft's website. <snip>

[ddrichardson]

What? Because all of the bugs from Vista and problems are fixed in Windows 7. Also, you can get Windows 7 for free at the moment, just download it from Microsoft's website. <snip>
My bold - really, all?

[khelben1979]

Vista (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_vista)? What is that? :-\"

[Tipped OuT]

My bold - really, all?

If you actaully tried it, you would see what I mean.


Vista (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_vista)? What is that? :-\"

:lolflag:

[Sand & Mercury]

The b**ch is that they're [Microsoft] not going to do anything that makes vista better because Microsoft wants you to purchase Windows 7 when its released...Why would we get 7 if Vista is better [now] than it was with SP2?
Vista is really quite good in its current state. It was crippled by a few big problems upon RTM, but they've worked hard to improve it. The UAC that everyone complains about is now no more intrusive than gksu is in Ubuntu, and file copying speeds are significantly improved. Also worthy of note is that the minimum requirements are no longer intimidating by today's standards. The only thing that's really defective about it at this point is its reputation.

But I digress...

Running SP2 now. No lighter on RAM, but I suppose that makes sense since lower resource usage is supposed to be one of W7's selling points.

[Polygon]

the only real improvement is that vista no longer gets stuck in 'half connected' mode when you resume from sleep/hibernate and you are no longer in range of the wireless network you were connected to when you hibernated. I was really hoping that they would just ship the windows 7 wireless framework, since its loads better, but i guess not.

thats pretty poor for a service pack. Everything else seems trivial and or useless to the majority of users. XP service pack 2 and 3 included a crap ton of new stuff and bug fixes. Here, we get...blu ray support.

but i guess thats why we all use linux amirite?

[PhilMize]

i installed it and have been running it on my home desktop the last few days...it's pretty stable, but have yet to really see a difference... vista is vista and always will be... 7 (http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php) runs way nicer anyways...





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(click link) HAHA FOOLED YOU! PWAAHAHAHA!:o

[ddrichardson]

If you actaully tried it, you would see what I mean.



:lolflag:That's quite an assumption - I've had a box beta testing Windows 7 in various candidates since Microsoft sent me a copy - it doesn't address all of Vistas bugs, no upgrade or new release does.

[Giant Speck]

I'm downloading it right now. I'm not expecting it to do much, but meh.

[Firestem4]

Vista is really quite good in its current state. It was crippled by a few big problems upon RTM, but they've worked hard to improve it. The UAC that everyone complains about is now no more intrusive than gksu is in Ubuntu, and file copying speeds are significantly improved. Also worthy of note is that the minimum requirements are no longer intimidating by today's standards. The only thing that's really defective about it at this point is its reputation.

But I digress...

Running SP2 now. No lighter on RAM, but I suppose that makes sense since lower resource usage is supposed to be one of W7's selling points.

Im not saying Vista is terrible right now..But by wide and large it has a lot of problems under the hood that need some serious assessment.

The only reason I don't complain much about my Vista partition is that my laptop is actually powerful enough to run it well. I can even play games too, lol.

[Firestem4]

I was just down at the Southwest Computer Convention over the weekend with a few guys from SCLug (Simi-Conejo Linux Users Group). We had a booth there setup and we gave away a nearly 200 Ubuntu CD's (At a convention with 300 people).

Microsoft had a keynote presentation during lunch. I stepped in for about half of it. Needless to say, My first impressions from their Windows 7 demo was not all that impressive. But at least they were not dull!

They gave away a ton of 7 RC's after the luncheon, and a Windows Home Server..Which was nothing but a very expensive RSYNC Server with MythTV capabilities. lol =)

The only thing im looking forward about Windows 7 is the smaller footprint on system resources. It takes up a hell of a lot more Hard Drive space (recommended 16gb/s) Im not too excited about that.

[Tipped OuT]

That's quite an assumption - I've had a box beta testing Windows 7 in various candidates since Microsoft sent me a copy - it doesn't address all of Vistas bugs, no upgrade or new release does.

Welcome to planet Earth! :D

[clonne4crw]

I downloaded the beta for it, was gonna try it in VMWare, but never got around to it. Tell me, is it any good/worth it?

[Wiebelhaus]

Is this a roll up? I have to deal with a lot of Vista installs and there's just a lot of updates and it's time consuming.

[ddrichardson]

Welcome to planet Earth! :D
I have no idea what you mean by that.

[Keithhed]

Got the update last night. seems the same. The OS isn't going to magically change into OSX or Lenny because of a SP. Its just an update guys...

[HappyFeet]

I feel left out as I don't use windows. Do you think someday I can aspire to be like you all and be lucky enough to use windows? One can dream though. :(

[forrestcupp]

Is this a roll up? I have to deal with a lot of Vista installs and there's just a lot of updates and it's time consuming.

Yes, it's a roll up. If you install it with Windows Update, you likely won't have to download quite as much. But if you have a lot of Vista installs, you're better off downloading the standalone network install and burning it to a CD/DVD. That way you're only downloading it once. The only reason I can't really do that is because one of my computers is running 64-bit, which is a separate download.

[pwnst*r]

I feel left out as I don't use windows. Do you think someday I can aspire to be like you all and be lucky enough to use windows? One can dream though. :(

Last edited by HappyFeet; 1 Hour Ago at 10:25 AM.

[1993cb7]

Im downloading now but im not holding my breath. Im looking at transforming my Vista box to a Mac mini by the end of the year hopefully.

[freeman2000]

I've been running Win 7 for over 2 years now. Yep, it's called Vista (and I do have SP2 installed). For anyone who thinks otherwise, get your fanboy head out of Bill's b.... Another great MS marketing job. Bill will be running to the bank again, laughing the whole way! The only real difference between SP2 & Win7 (internally Vista is called 6.0 and Win7 is called 6.1) is that MS left 2 tweaks out of SP2 - the UAC tweak and the "indexing" tweak. You can install Tweak UAC or Smart UAC to resolve the UAC problem, and you can turn off "indexing" which will free up Ram, and stop the hard drive from "spinning" all day.

In order to free up even more Ram, I would also recommend that you turn off many unnecessary processes that are running in the background. Which ones? Go to www.sysinfo.org for an in-depth database. Go to the Win Task Manager to find out what's running, and go to www.sysinfo.org to see if it's needed. If not, disable it or turn it off. I was able to turn off over 20 processes that run from startup, freeing up Ram and significantly speeding things up. Good luck.

[MikeTheC]

I installed it on Wednesday, having just re-wiped my system on Tuesday evening. And not that I care so much about the size of the SP2 update, but what really grinds and grates on me is the fact that you have to go through so many preliminary update-and-reboot sessions. I can't help but think that an average person doing a fresh setup of their system would probably find it took at least a couple weeks to go from a fresh install to having every update (SP1 and SP2 included) simply because, unless they're sitting there driving the update process manually, there are significant massive delays.

Here's a question: Why is it that Microsoft doesn't just let you download the whole group of relevant updates, and then automate the install-and-reboot process so you just don't have to worry about it? Surely this couldn't be that hard to accomplish, especially for a company with the resources that Microsoft has.

In fairness, though not *quite* as bad, Apple is very similar in this respect (meaning that as you go through the release cycle, you are required to through rounds of install-and-reboot, over and over again).

Prior to installing Jaunty on my system, about three weeks before its release I had occasion to nuke-n-pave my Ubuntu setup. There were a bunch of updates to install, but the interesting thing about Ubuntu's update process (in specific) and Linux' update process (in general) is:

1. You don't have to go through multiple updates to something; rather it's a point-to-point jump.

2. Everything is acquired in one shot; updates are done, and the system is rebooted (if necessary).

So, if a "freebie" OS can do that, what's Microsoft and Apple's excuse?

[forrestcupp]

Here's a question: Why is it that Microsoft doesn't just let you download the whole group of relevant updates, and then automate the install-and-reboot process so you just don't have to worry about it? Surely this couldn't be that hard to accomplish, especially for a company with the resources that Microsoft has.


They do. It's called Windows Update. Yesterday, I installed SP2 using Windows Update. It automatically downloaded only the updates that were relevant to my machine; I think for my 64-bit OS, mine was around 560 MB. Then after I accepted the license agreement (which you even have to do in Linux if you're installing Java), it automatically installed everything, only restarting on its own once. Then it was done. The only user interaction was that I clicked install to install the sp2, and I checked the license agreement box. Other than that, I set my laptop down and it did the rest on its own, even restarting the one time. The whole process took about 20 minutes on my machine.

I really don't know what you're complaining about.