News - Service Pack 2 beta for Vista and Server 2008 now available to all

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As expected, Microsoft's public download centre now offers a beta build of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.

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Read more.

Anyone tried it yet? what is your thoughts?

i'm downloading it now, will share my thoughts on it after a bit of gaming and stuff, see if the 'improved Direct X' is actually improved or not :P

Beta service pack.... no ta.

Better to wait till other's find the flaws in it first :)

I would, but at the moment i'm working on important stuff and can not deal with any unforeseen hassle.

Could this be the first ever article about Microsoft to begin with the words "Right on schedule..."??

:eek:

i would but my "messing around" hdd is being used for storage till i get my home server sorted, so im going to have to give this a miss

I'm giving it a miss, too. Do have a spare partition ready and waiting for Windows 7 beta 1 next month, though. :)

installed, and all seems fine so far. :)
seemed to boot faster too. whenever the Vista boot screen comes up, it would let the bar run across the screen 3 times before the HD activity LED would actually light up, but now it's almost straight away which is much better :P

also got a spare 250GB HD for Windows 7 beta (whenever that is :P)

"Includes ability to record data to Blu-Ray media."


Great stuff!! It's good to see Microsoft are staying up to date with modern recording technologies etc - in XP they decided not to included DVD burning as it was too expensive... obviously a company with income in the billions can't afford that;)

Here's hoping they include a fix for the dreaded nvlddmkm errors which i still seem to be getting from time to time!

Hello,

has anyone tryed the Basic scenario for compcln.exe

instuctions here

after running the compcln.exe you cannot uninstall SP2 you have been warned
so i surgest you image first and restore image after trying it.


I cant seem to get the before and after commands to work.

I opened up notepad
I pasted in the before line and saved the file as blah.cmd
I run the cmd file as admnistrator
I got a before text file called files_before in the root of C: but there is nothing in it.
I ran compcln.exe command. before C: had 18.5gb used. after 17.8gb used.
I pasted the after line in to note pad and saved it as blah after.cmd
ran it as administrator and got a text file called files_after in the root of C: once again nothing in the text file
any ideas if i have done anything wrong with the before and after commands?

@Tonka777
Are you talking about the display drivers stopped responding nvlddmkm.sys BSOD?

If so, check your RAM. Get and run memtest. This is what caused me weeks of misery. A temporary fix was to turn off my pc, then switch mains off at the wall, let the mobo discharge then hit the start button a few times for good measure and then finally power on and boot up. Would keep my system stable for a couple of hours/ days till it started again.

The nice people at crucial changed my sticks of RAM over for me after I told them they had failed memest. Been stable ever since. hth.

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Originally Posted by Nub1

@Tonka777
Are you talking about the display drivers stopped responding nvlddmkm.sys BSOD?
If so, check your RAM. Get and run memtest.

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I'm 99.99% sure that the whole system is stable, i primed it for 35 hours when i finished tweaking it. I'm going to run memtest again though, would be silly not to now its been recommended directly!
I think its a Vista Issue, I never saw anything similar using the same gpu and drivers on XP64, its shocking that it hasn't been fixed yet if it is!

Well it's worth a try anyways, I had all sorts of hell with that problem.
Did all that searching the hard drive for any nvidia drivers, taking ownership and deleting, running any driver cleaner I could get my hands on. Opening up the files looking for the newest version and deleting all the old .sys files. All to no avail, I then started to get it on fresh re-installs of vista before I installed the drivers. :wallbash:
Got the new RAM just after Christmas last year and it's been plain sailing since. Really do hope you get it sorted, it was so frustrating.

For any other readers of this thread, sorry for the thread hijack.

had it installed for a full day now, done some gaming and been folding all day, not had a single crash.. seems very good for a 'beta' service pack tbh :)

cut 8s off my boot time too :P
record boot time using this

Installing Microsoft OS Beta software is done at your own peril.

IE8 Beta 2 was almost unusable for me (due to habits, like cutting the address bar, it locked up. A known bug). Auto Complete couldn't be turned off either or it crashed completely!

I had to uninstall it, luckily IE7 works fine again for me - reading around the net, others had some problems "rolling back".

I am going to wait for the proper release of SP2.

indeed WoLFe, BETA, means just that. Not ready, we know its broken.

All to often people forget this, and end up crippeling their only PC.

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Originally Posted by Parm

I'm giving it a miss, too. Do have a spare partition ready and waiting for Windows 7 beta 1 next month, though. :)

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Sorry to hijack the thread, but is this a public beta? I'd be interested in having a play on a spare partition as well and see what I think. I know everyone and his dog had vista as a beta lol.

Also, I'll give the beta a miss on my main machine - things are working right now and installing an unfinished patch could break it all! Big risk for little perceived benefit imo.

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Originally Posted by Dreaming

Sorry to hijack the thread, but is this a public beta? I'd be interested in having a play on a spare partition as well and see what I think. I know everyone and his dog had vista as a beta lol.

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Dreaming, as far as I can remember, Microsoft has stated early 2009 for the public Windows 7 beta. However, the general consensus is that it'll arrive mid-January.

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Originally Posted by Parm

Dreaming, as far as I can remember, Microsoft has stated early 2009 for the public Windows 7 beta. However, the general consensus is that it'll arrive mid-January.

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I might well get involved in that. I'll see if I can do some bug reports aden hopefully get a free copy of it when it goes full release!

Thanks for the heads up. Will give this a try on my Windows Server 2008 test system. Hopefully they will bundle in some Hyper-V improvements.

Been running it since Friday now. Noticed some things seem a bit quicker, although got an issue with a few heavy apps that are acting as if they are generating a ton more disk activity then they used to. It's quite noticeable.

Still trying to figure out the hows and whys... :O_o1:

I hope this doesnt become a required download, im happy with my vista as it is, many upgrades simply fail it :/