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The 14th, Microsoft made Vista Service Pack 1 available for both MSDN and Technet subscribers. It is also available for Volume License customers via the MVLS site. General availability is still scheduled for mid-March, then via individual download or via Windows Update.

I downloaded and installed on my home computer running Vista Ultimate x64. The installation was very smooth and I've had no problems with it at all. I haven't really dug in deep yet and looked at the improvements that Service Pack 1 promises yet, but at least the installation was without any problems at all. Network copying seems to be much quicker now, but I don't have any real benchmarks to base that on.


More interestingly though, I just noticed that Windows Server 2008 was available to me from MVLS. It might be available on MSDN and TechNet as well for all I know, but I haven't checked.

I plan on running Server 2008 as my Laptop OS, as Vista didn't perform all that well on it. Server 2008 and Vista both share the same kernel, and were basically developed as one branch in house at Microsoft until Vista went RTM.

One small fun fact is that the release version of Server 2008 includes Service Pack 1, so the "I'll wait until the first Service Pack is released before I install it" argument is moot. I don't think Microsoft has done anything like that, since perhaps the Exchange 4 release which, if memory servers right, had a fixup package installed in the final release version. I'm not 100% certain that this was the case though, but something along those lines came to mind when writing this.

Update: Iain McDonald explains why the release version of 2008 has Service Pack 1 included on his MSDN blog post Windows Server 2008 is called SP1. Adventures in doing things right?

The download is under way right now, and will most likely reinstall the laptop some time tonight or tomorrow, depending on when the 2.5GB download is finished.

I'll be back with a more comprehensive post regarding using Server 2008 as a laptop OS after I've been running it for a while.

After the Windows Server 2003 SP2 release, I decided to give the Hotfix Scan Tool a spin, to see if it would identify any potential problems prior to testing the SP2 installation itself.

The first thing noticed was that the installation details on the download page are incorrect. The site states "Download the compressed file and double-click to activate it. It will then extract files to a directory you choose." which doesn't apply to this download. The installation routine places HotFixScanTool.vbs directly in %systemroot%\system32.

Secondly, since this is a vbscript, and it's installed in the system path, you should be able to run it by double clicking it, typing the filename in a cmd window or directly from the run command on the start menu. In my case, that didn't work and I got the following error:

Doing Start->Run->cmd.exe and typing in cscript %systemroot%\system32\HotFixScanTool.vbs did the trick though:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>cscript %systemroot%\system32\HotFixScanTool.vbs
Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2001. All rights reserved.

Detecting if any updates in the Block installation list were 
installed on the system...

No updates in the block installation list were detected.
You can proceed to install Windows Server 2003 SP2

C:\WINDOWS\system32>

So far, so good but if this is an indication of the quality level of the rest of SP2 I'm somewhat worried.

All of a sudden, Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 is available for download. Check the Microsoft site for more details regarding what patches are included in SP2.

Microsoft has also made a Hotfix Scan Tool available than scans for hotfixes that will potentially regress after the installation. Be sure to run that to make sure everything applies properly. The tool can be run before SP2 deployment as well as after.

KB931940 should have more details about the tool (vbscript) but that seems to be unavailable at the time of writing.

Happy patching and updating.

Update 1: If you run, or plan to run, Windows Server 2003 R2 be sure to upgrade to R2 before applying Service Pack 2. If you don’t, you will not be able to uninstall SP2 after the R2 installation.

Update 2: Apparently you need to uninstall IE7 before installing SP2, as SP2 installs IE6. I have not verified this though.