Final testing is complete and at 10:08am this morning we signed off on
build 2180 as Windows XP Service Pack 2, releasing it to manufacturing.
The final build will be available to beta sites immediately at
http://windowsbeta.microsoft.com/download/dl3.asp. You will find both
English and German versions there, Japanese will follow early next week.
Next week the service pack will be available on the Microsoft Download
Center for general download. In the interim we're making the update
available to you via the beta web site.
If you are running RC2, or any other build released to beta sites, we invite
you to turn on Automatic Updates, and starting on August 10th your system
will automatically download the express version of Windows XP SP2. For
typical home users this is about a 75 MB download; for those on RC2 it
should be less than 30 MB. As soon as the background download is
complete, you will be prompted to install SP2 and to accept the EULA (SP2
does not install automatically even if Automatic Updates is set to
automatically install security updates). If you have a modem connection,
don't "Cancel" the update once it's in progress; just disconnect and when
you reconnect later, it will automatcially pick up where it left off until it
completes.
Q: What's next?
A: For the next 2 weeks the beta newsgroups will still be available to you.
We'll be in the newsgroups and hope you'll discuss your experience with
early SP2 deployments there. On August 18th the newsgroups will close
and we'll move on to finding and fixing the bugs in Windows 2003 Server
SP1.
Thanks for all your time and effort in driving the quality high in SP2 and
finding those tricky issue that only seem to occur in the wild and never under
laboratory conditions. Be sure to verify and update your contact information
at
http://beta.microsoft.com so we can get in touch with you in the future.
I hope your experience testing SP2 was a good one. We've saved the chat
logs and when we build the next beta program I'll see what we can do to
implement some of your suggestions.
Paul