At long last, Vista SP2 is in beta test and the news so far seems good. Initial tests indicate performance improvements have been made in various areas. Bluetooth support has been improved, they’ve added the ability to burn Blu-Ray discs, and Windows Search has been beefed up.

In even better news for users of Zonealarm and Spysweeper, SP2 will finally allow these add-in products to work with POP mail accounts. Apparently this functionality doesn’t work in current Vista releases, and now that I know that I’m happier than ever that I haven’t upgraded. I use POP mail and am a long-time Zonealarm user, so I’d have been mighty unhappy to run across this little issue.

Finally, the new service pack fixes a few problems that are very important to certain users. These include “support for the new VIA 64-bit CPU” and “a version of the exFAT file system for removable storage that now supports UTC timestamps for file synchronization across time zones.” The former is somewhat esoteric (I know few people using the VIA chip yet), while the latter is certainly critical for some large businesses that operate internationally, or even in large countries with multiple time zones. It’s almost certainly irrelevant to most home users.

Of course there’s no release date yet (or at least none has been announced) and this is most definitely beta code. Anyone can get it if you feel like downloading 300MB (32-bit version) or 490MB (64-bit) from TechNet or tweaking some settings that will let Windows Update install the beta release. While it might be a good idea for companies to start testing this release now, you certainly don’t want it on your one-and-only production PC. Beta code is generally pretty solid, but it’s still not production ready. Also note that the current beta installation will expire in 2010, so you must upgrade to a full release prior to that date or it’ll just stop working.

Will Vista finally become a usable product? If so, why did it take two major service packs to achieve this level?

Here’s hoping the highly touted Windows 7 release will be better than Vista’s premiere. If it isn’t, Microsoft is in big trouble.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.