Microsoft's new update to Windows Vista is arriving by mid-spring. Vista Service Pack 2 should be sufficiently complete to reach release candidate status by February and to be finished by April, when it would be sent to manufacturing for DVD versions and prepared as a download for existing users.

As with SP1, the actual launch would be staggered based on languages; English and other European languages as well as Japanese would be available first, while Chinese and other key languages would receive the update later.

SP2 will represent a switch in strategy for Vista for Microsoft, which released SP1 early this year chiefly as a fix for performance and stability problems that are widely believed to have hurt early Vista sales. The newer update instead focuses on feature support and will add native Blu-ray burning, Bluetooth 2.1, the previously optional Windows Search 4.0 app and a new Wi-Fi configuration utility to set up more complex wireless networking.

An April gold date leaves SP2 arriving just a few months before Windows 7, which is being moved up to 2009 from its previously projected early 2010 launch window. XP SP2 was nonetheless partly considered an emergency update to address security issues where the Vista patch focuses more on the user experience.