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Microsoft announced that anyone interested in testing the Release Candidate of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 could now do so, one week after the company issued a more limited rollout.
The Release Candidate can either be downloaded from this site, or else installed through Windows Update via the use of the Windows Update Experience Kit.
“If you have the SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 beta installed, you will need to uninstall that first before installing the RC,” Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team, noted in a blog posting.
SP2 has been released with several goals in mind; for the enterprise, one of the paramount ones may be the updates that “make it easier for IT administrators to deploy and manage large installations of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008,” according to the company.
On Feb. 25, Microsoft made the Release Candidate of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers prior to final release.
At the time, LeBlanc noted in a blog post that Microsoft would make the release candidate broadly available in the “near future.” That moment has evidently arrived.
Microsoft plans to release SP2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 in the second quarter of 2009; in addition to supporting new types of hardware and emerging standards, SP2 will also deliver a variety of new updates and improvements.
Developers and anyone else interested can provide feedback on SP2 here.