Microsoft has made the first beta of SP2 for Vista publicly available. Brave souls who wish to install it now can try some of the improvements like reduced resource consumption for sidebar gadgets, 10% better power saving and Windows Search 4. This is as well as the mandatory long list of security and bug fixes.

It is reported that you will have to uninstall the beta in order to install the final release of SP2 when it becomes available some time in April 2009.

For more details check out PC World’s article Vista SP2: Six Things You Need to Know.

Here are some of the highlights of what SP2 includes

• Better blu-ray support.
  
• Better Wi-Fi performance when you’re exiting Vista’s sleep mode.
  
• Reduced resources required to run your various sidebar gadgets
  
• Support for exFAT which can handle larger files.
  
• Power management efficiency improvements by as much as 10 percent
  

32 and 64-bit downloads are available at the Microsoft Download Center.