Server 2008/Vista SP2 Beta - Download Links

[Richard Dower]

x86 (32bit): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dca54ecc-362a-4b4d-b62b-22780e839a7e&DisplayLang=en

x64(64bit): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=361d0ca3-4b2c-4f1c-8b3e-de376fdb1de8&DisplayLang=en

My install wasn't so smooth, after the normal restart my screen went blank and the install just stopped...i had to press the reset button, which as folks should know is a BAD thing to do when installing a service pack...but on the surface the install seems to have taken but not really tested etc.

[Marvin_The_Martian]

Thanks DL now :up:

[rogard]

hmm personally I think this should be more of a "1a" release.

Thanks for the heads up

[Origin_Unknown]

x86 (32bit): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dca54ecc-362a-4b4d-b62b-22780e839a7e&DisplayLang=en

x64(64bit): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=361d0ca3-4b2c-4f1c-8b3e-de376fdb1de8&DisplayLang=en

My install wasn't so smooth, after the normal restart my screen went blank and the install just stopped...i had to press the reset button, which as folks should know is a BAD thing to do when installing a service pack...but on the surface the install seems to have taken but not really tested etc.



lol judging by your install ill wait untill some other people have tested it

[Marvin_The_Martian]

Won't have to wait long.. ;)

edit:

Jeez 'installation can take an hour and will reboot multiple times'

Ahh welll :D

[GAR]

Im interested to see if any performance benefits exist in SP2.

[Lestat]

Won't have to wait long.. ;)

edit:

Jeez 'installation can take an hour and will reboot multiple times'

Ahh welll :D

SP1 says the exact same thing Marvin..

[xVeinx]

Supposedly there are improvements to Direct X allowing for a better "visual experience".

[Marvin_The_Martian]

SP1 says the exact same thing Marvin..

Had to walk the dog, just came in and voila :up: Also, no stalls, black desktop that's true but it gave me some message about live mail being configured and it only took a minute before the desktop showed up ( live mail has quit working on me last week, thought I had a virus or something :shrug: )

http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/6879/sp2gz2.th.png (http://img116.imageshack.us/my.php?image=sp2gz2.png)

Now.. I just installed it for the 'novelty', so I guess I need to look up the changenotes now and see it actually brings me anything :rofl:

[redrumy3]

Those with prebeta this is the same build v113 :)

[cky2k6]

Supposedly there are improvements to Direct X allowing for a better "visual experience".

Doesn't sp2 contain dx11? I'm guessing thats what they refer to.

[Syn.]

Installed and errr..... what happened? Everything runs normal besides the new build 6002 build number i am not noticing anything new.

[Marvin_The_Martian]

I never had bsod's before installing this.. but I do now ( had 2 reboots already :down: )

[initialised]

Doesn't sp2 contain dx11? I'm guessing thats what they refer to.DXDiag still says Version 10

[flopper]

5min install.
crosses fingers

[zanzabar]

i installed it it took like 3-5mins the dload was longer than the install, no problems yet and the desktop seams more responsive and network activity uses less cpu and memory

fixes the net stack corruption with a dedicated APU and hardware acceleration through openAL

[GAR]

I think ill just wait for final SP2, since my system is running solid and stable, no reason to change anything, if it aint broke, dont fix it.

[sonofander]

I thought it was-

"if it ain't broke, fix it till it is" :D

[kadozer]

Install not successful. Reverting back to original configuration or something like that.

[Syn.]

Anyone know when the BETA will end? Because i am getting scared of the Evaluation Copy message in bottom right corner.

[zanzabar]

i dont know if my copy is magic but it dosnt say evaluation

[mikeyakame]

It also doesn't say it if you modify the user32.dll.mui with a resource editor and remove the necessary strings that make displaying it possible. Too much hassle though for something you stop noticing after a few days. It was a nice thing to do back when we were beta testing Vista but seems fruitless now.

Have you activated it yet? it doesn't say Evaluation until you activate if I recall correctly. Then it may require a reboot to display. I installed it over a month ago so can't be certain anymore, a month is a long time.

There is a lot of small changes, for one the amount of WMI based counter warnings and errors in Event Viewer have been sorted out and my Event Viewer is happy for that! I've still got one persistent WMI event error I can't figure out which GUID it's tied to, but that's a minor issue thats not important.

Let me see, updated Bluetooth stack, hard drive<->hard drive and hard drive<->usb performance is more consistent now Microsoft made a few little changes to the VDS, and queueing/caching priority in the kernel mode code. They got rid of the annoying Event viewer warning about no Kerberos service found that has been present since the RTM. Hard to say if graphics performance is improved, but I've found the threshold for video driver unresponsive is a little more tolerant without resulting in the video card being unable to recover. There's probably a few other things I've noticed but that's all I can think of for now. Most of the changes are under the hood and won't be seen unless you play around with WMI, HTTPDs, SQL servers, etc.

Heres a list of the hotfix's included.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335033.aspx

Release Notes.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335042.aspx

Changelog for differences that will benefit most.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335036.aspx

In depth Scenarios to test functionality of changes between SP1 and current SP2 CPP. (probably useless for most but it's thorough and details the under the hood changes, and more importantly testing scenarios for bug reporting and confirmation that the fixes are implemented correctly)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335035.aspx

[zanzabar]

i have ulti oem x86, and no edited files that i know of and im activated. i used my MS ulti sp1 dev disk to install it though would that change it

[mikeyakame]

Sounds feasible to me if you are using a dev copy of SP1, I believe I remember hearing something along those lines in the early days with MS dev editions not displaying the Eval data. The user32.dll.mui most likely doesn't have the resources compiled into it to handle expiration and evaluation display since dev releases dont require online activation and can be done locally with that cool little tool MS supplies on the disc for offline activation ;)

[zanzabar]

mine is online activation needed, but if there is an offline tool i should look at the what i thought were junk disks that it came with

and they didnt fix the net stack audio hardware openAL conflict yet but it took about 10 hours to corrupt instead of 30mins so i guess that progress

[mikeyakame]

mine is online activation needed, but if there is an offline tool i should look at the what i thought were junk disks that it came with

and they didnt fix the net stack audio hardware openAL conflict yet but it took about 10 hours to corrupt instead of 30mins so i guess that progress

Should be on the Install DVD in one of the subdirectories, whether all the ones issued have that I couldn't say for certain, but there were at least TAP partner and MSDN issued dev discs that included the offline activation app and a handful of other useful junk to bypass digital driver enforcement in 64bit builds for "testing" etc.