[NEWS] Windows XP SP2 has released to manufacturing

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.