The New Service Pack is expected to be available for Technet, MSDN, and Volume Licensing customers on February 17^th, with a release to the General public about a week later. Of course these dates can move around a bit. The product was Released to Manufacturing on February 9^th.

How much difference will you see after you install this Service Pack?

For most people there won’t be any notable change to what you are doing or any fantastic new features. Unless you do quite a bit with Virtualization, most of this service pack is about compiling the hotfixes and patches. If you look at the notable changes document you will find that the majority of changes revolve around some services that are not used by most people (Direct Access, Failover Clustering, etc…)

For those of you using Hyper-V or VDI, there are some really nice new features. Primarily Dynamic Memory in Hyper-V which will allow a much greater density of Virtual Machines on each server. Microsoft says around a 40% improvement of density per server. RemoteFX is the other big feature which will allow you to Virtualize the GPU on a server to the Virtual Desktop. Giving a much richer desktop experience to client machines, especially the very low cost, very thin client devices.

Starting with Windows Vista and being improved in Windows 7 is the new search capabilities. Searching for content in your computer has never been quicker than it is now.

With the indexing service it is very simple and fairly quick to not only search for a file name but to search the contents of documents and email.

Microsoft builds in filters for many of the common file types (doc, docx, xls, xlsx, txt, etc…) however some third party software has files that are not indexed by default.

PDF files are a very common file that is used that is not indexed by default. You must install Acrobat reader or some other viewer, which will register the PDF extension with the system and start indexing the files.

If you are running the 32 bit version of Windows Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 will automatically install the ifilter program which will allow the system to not only index the file name but also index the contents of PDF files that are recognized as text. Some PDF files recognize the contents as text and other while showing words see them as a picture. Usually this can depend on how the file was created. If you take a Word doc and save as a PDF, Acrobat can recognize the characters. If you scan a document Acrobat will usually see this as a picture of the paper, you can run OCR software to covert to characters.

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