Well the day has finally come – Windows 2008, and Vista SP1 have been released to manufacturing. If you are a MSDN subscriber you can download both of them – if you can get in.

Right now it looks like the MSDN servers are being crushed by the number of people trying to download:

For Windows 2008 the highlights are:

-Significantly improved performance of IIS

-Built-in virtualization (Hypervisor)

-Faster file sharing (There have been many good benchmarks on this one)

-Introduction of the Core edition (A stripped down command line only version)

More information about the Windows 2008

For Vista SP1:

– 50% improvement of network file copies. (Sure hope this is true)

– Resuming from sleep mode significantly improved

– Many common causes of crashes addressed, and fixed

– Faster RDP sessions.

Some more detailed information from Microsoft:

Notable Changes in Vista SP1

Overview of Vista SP1

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