Testers get SP2 Release Candidate for Vista and Server 2008

Microsoft today released the Release Candidate build of Service Pack 2 (6002.16670.090130) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to Microsoft Connect testers. The company is letting testers grab it via Windows Update (in 48 hours, all languages), as a standalone installer package, or as a slipstreamed version in English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese. The public beta release is not yet available Microsoft is recommending for the average customer to "wait until the final release prior to installing this service pack" and for testers to remember that "a Service Pack is not a feature release—we are not looking for new feature suggestions, only SP2 regressions, Crashes, and confirmation of fixes we’ve made will be considered for this milestone."

As with previous service packs, SP2 will include all previous updates and patches for the operating system (for example, SP2 marks the inclusion of Hyper-V into Windows Server 2008 natively). SP2 RC contains 691 hotfixes alone (full list below). There are also reports of significant performance improvements (on top of those in SP1).

So beyond hotfixes and bug fixes, what does SP2 add for Windows Vista and Window Server 2008? In addition to a Service Pack Clean-up tool (Compcln.exe) which helps recover hard disk space by permanently deleting previous versions of files (RTM and SP1) that are being serviced by SP2, there are improvements in various areas:

Source- ARS Technica