With all the talk surrounding Microsoft’s upcoming savior OS, Windows 7, much of the chatter regarding the development of Windows Vista has fallen to the wayside, forgotten that over %23 of the computer population is still running Windows Vista, and with support for XP dying out in 2010 it is poised to become runner up for at least a few years. As such, Microsoft has obviously continued the development and last year (2008), rolled out a beta of Service Pack 2 for users, and today it has been finally been released for full public adoption. The update hasn’t yet been rolled out onto Windows Update, but is available for direct download for both 32 and 64-bit (Links Here)

SP1 is considered a prerequisite, in order to install the SP2 update and it is currently available in 5 languages, including English and French versions (more coming soon). Download sizes are roughly 348MB for the 32-bit and 544 for 64-bit for the standalone installers and contain the updates for both Vista and Server 2008, the upcoming Windows Update package is expect to run 43MB (x86) and 60MB (x64) for Vista and 47/90MB for Server 08.

With this update, there is the typical packaging of security and bug fixes released since SP1, as well as a few new hardware functions, such as native Blu Ray writing, support for Bluetooth 2.1,  improved Wi-Fi performance when returning from sleep mode and support for 64-bit VIA CPU’s. All in all, nothing near critical as was Service Pack 1, but it is a relatively small and easy roll on update for to combine the numerous fixes within the past year or so since SP1

Download:

32-Bit Standalone

64-bit Standalone

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Release Notes/Notable Changes