Microsoft is laboring to serve Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista a little over a year after the availability of Service Pack 1, beating Windows 7 to the market. The first development milestones of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 have already shipped to testers and are even available for download for users of the operating system outside of the limited testing pool selected by Microsoft. Come 2009, the Redmond company will make available the Release Candidate of the operating system's SP2 one year after the RTM of SP1, just to deliver the gold bits a couple of months after that.

According to TechARP, Microsoft will offer the first Release Candidate of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista in February 2009. Vista SP1 was of course released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, concomitantly with the RTM of Windows Server 2008. Come April 2009, the software giant reportedly plans to sign-off the code for Vista SP2. As it happened with SP1, the RTM and availability deadlines for Vista SP2 might not coincide. Vista SP1 RTM'd in February but was only up for grabs in mid-March 2008.

While building Windows 7, the Redmond company is also looking to the evolution of Vista, but SP2 will be nothing more than a standard service pack release. Fact is that the impact delivered by SP2 for Vista SP1 is bound to be equivalent to that of SP3 for Windows XP SP2. While SP2 will represent an evolution for Vista, it will be nowhere at the level of Windows 7, which according to all reports will be offered by the end of 2009.

Microsoft already offered the first taste of Windows Vista SP2 via a Beta release, namely Build 6002.16497. By the looks of the first Beta Build of Vista SP2, Microsoft appears to focus on under-the-hood changes such as support for Bluetooth 2.1, and the introduction of Windows Search 4.0 and Windows Connect Now. Chances are very scarce that SP2 will do for SP1 what SP1 did for Vista RTM.

Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) Build 16497 is available for download here.