Service Pack 2 is not a cumulative update, so administrators will need to ensure that clients targeted for upgrade to SP2 are already running Service Pack 1. As such, administrators should only run the command on systems they are sure won’t need to be restored to a previous state. However, I found that running compcln.exe removed my ability to uninstall the service pack. In my tests, I was able to recover about 330MB of space by running the command. To recover some of the hard drive space used by the service pack, Microsoft integrated the executable compcln.exe, which removes archived versions of operating system files replaced by SP2.

When fully installed, I found that SP2 used about 1GB of hard drive space, although Microsoft recommends that clients targeted for upgrade have a minimum of 7GB of free hard drive space (13GB for 64-bit installations) for the update to complete.Ĭlick here for eWEEK Labs’ first look at SP2 RC. I found installation of the Five Language Standalone executable took between 21 and 27 minutes on my clean instances. I installed Service Pack 2 on a pair of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 x86 clients-one on a physical machine (a Dell XPS m1330) and a second on a VMware Workstation virtual instance. Unlike Service Pack 1 for Vista, which delivered such highly tangible benefits to the end user as streamlined UAC controls and faster file transfer speeds, eWEEK Labs’ preliminary explorations reveal Service Pack 2 delivers few significant updates to Vista users or administrators. Microsoft officials March 5 followed through on their February promise to quickly deliver a Release Candidate for Service Pack 2 for both Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server.

Windows vista sp2 release date