Microsoft released a pre-beta Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista on 4 December. We downloaded a Vista Enterprise .ISO image with SP2 beta (v113) from our Technet account, and installed it on an Intel Core2 Duo P8400 2.26GHz system with 2Gb of DDR2 333MHz system memory.

Microsoft has added native Blu-ray support, a Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack and a simpler Wi-Fi configuration feature called Windows Connect Now. Other features in SP2 are Windows Search 4.0 and the exFAT file system which supports UTC timestamps for correct file synching across different time zones.

SP2 also has improved power management, up to 10 per cent better in some configurations, according to Microsoft, and now has the ability to manage these settings through Group Policy if Windows Server 2008 is deployed.

Microsoft has added improved DirectX Graphic display reliability for users running high-end applications or gamers requiring lots of graphics processing, as well as better performing HD content.

We installed a number of applications, including Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 and OpenOffice.org 3.0. The only application that caused problems was the Wireshark protocol analyser 1.0.4, which gave an error when installing Microsoft's Network Monitor Driver saying that we would not be able to packet capture dial-up or virtual private network connections.

Vista has suffered from application and driver incompatibilities, but only one of the applications we successfully installed seemed unstable although this was only an early look at the SP2 release.

Benchmarking a beta release would probably not be valid, but our Windows Performance Index value for Vista Enterprise with SP2 was 3.7, exactly the same as Vista Enterprise patched to SP1 level. Better benchmarks would undoubtedly show any differences.

Mike Nash, corporate vice president for Windows product management, said in a blog posting that Windows Vista SP2 will include all updates delivered since the release of Vista SP1, and gives a tentative launch date for SP2 as the second half of 2009.

Nash also said that, since Microsoft now has a single serviceability model, the Windows Vista client and Windows Server 2008, these improvements are integrated into a single service pack covering Windows Vista (client) and Windows Server 2008 (server) versions.

One thing that always irritated us is that it was not possible to disconnect a USB device which was currently being browsed, like you could with Windows XP. And you still can't in Vista SP2.

After the install there were a number of drivers missing for our hardware, and the only one we could pull off the Windows Update site was one for the wireless card. Even the network interface driver was missing, although users would normally keep hold of the driver disks that come with any newly purchased system.