XP Service Pack Slows Programs

AEton writes "Vnunet and others are reporting that Windows XP's Service Pack 1 has introduced a flaw into the operating system. Changes to memory handling code result in programs which often allocate memory (which is many of them) can take up to ten times longer than normal to start. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem in Q815411, and while a patch is available by request from Microsoft Product Services, it will not be widely released until Service Pack 2."

Comments

In the meantime

[worst_name_ever]

...In the meantime, Microsoft suggests you refrain from running programs which use memory. Thank you for your patience.

Re:In the meantime

[dserpell]

Go developers! Boycot M$... Just made your programs allocate large ammounts of memory!

On a second tought, perhaps that's what M$ programs are already doing...

Re:In the meantime

[jbondjr]

This would include the XP OS, no?

Re:In the meantime

[Goalie_Ca]

hahaa. lol. good one.

Re:In the meantime

[heitikender]

By releasing Service Pack 2, Microsoft brings several advantages to user community and to industrial zone, too. Along the other things, it makes possible to make smaller cellphones.

So, does this mean (proverbally)

[rdewald]

the dancing monkeyfish is back in the barrel? I use my XP box for off-line multimedia only, I SP1'd, I did. All the guys were doing it. I didn't know I had a problem, it seems just as slow now as it was before.

HAHA

[teamhasnoi]

It looks like the pirates who weren't allowed to upgrade to SP1 have gotten the last laugh. Piracy does pay! Thanks MS, for pointing this out.

Re:HAHA

[bonch]

Pirates everywhere are outraged that the hard work they put into downloading, spreading, and cracking Windows XP in order to install SP1 has resulted in another bizarre Microsoft bug.

"I sat and ran my key generator for up to 20 minutes before I was able to get a valid key! Then I had to reactive Windows and change the key to install SP1," said one anonymous source. "But if errors like this are the results of all the effort I put into providing slipstreamed SP1 installs on eMule and USENET, Microsoft has definitely lost another customer."

Efforts are underway to convert pirated Windows installations to free alternatives in order to reduce costs and save time. "I don't have to download BlueKey to upgrade a few RPMS. Once XP's SP2 beta leaks onto the net, you can bet I won't be so forgiving next time when I crack it."

Re:HAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

I sat and ran my key generator for up to 20 minutes before I was able to get a valid key

Actually it only takes about 3 minutes to generate a valid key.

Re:HAHA

[zootread]

It looks like the pirates who weren't allowed to upgrade to SP1 have gotten the last laugh. Piracy does pay! Thanks MS, for pointing this out.

I thought the same thing. Unfortunately, I'm one of the pirates who used a crack which allowed me to install SP1. Now I regret what I have done.. no, not pirating WinXP, I regret installing SP1.

Fortunately, I don't use that WinXP box for much (at least not for booting WinXP).

Re:HAHA

[deadsaijinx*]

uhhhhh..... what are you talking about. My hexed version of XP handles SP1 just fine, though now I am thinking about reinstalling winders without SP1.

Re:HAHA

[KiwiSurfer]

3 minutes on what kind of processor?

Re:HAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a faster keygen out there. TheBlueList works by generating random keys and checking for validity, you know - oh, and its random routine is messed up so it has the tendency to generate the same group of keys at the beginning (leave it running for a couple of days, count duplicates, THEN take one that wasn't duplicated). There are flaws in the key algorithm which allow for more intelligent guesses - not much more intelligent, but the quasi-random routine in the new keygen's better. That keygen works at about three keys a minute on an Athlon XP 2200+.

Of course, I can't give a link here, so you'll have to go searching.

Re:HAHA

[zootread]

Yeah, I knew that was a misleading sentence when I wrote :)

It's a dual-boot box with WinXP and FreeBSD, which I failed to mention (and will put Gentoo on that one at some point). I generally boot FreeBSD when I boot it up. The few times I have been booting up WinXP it was because I have been helping my friends troubleshoot WinXP. I pirated and installed WinXP just for the eXPerience, so I know my way around it, not for any real use.

Re:HAHA

[njb42]

Of course, the pirates have already posted the Q815411 hotfix to various newsgroups.

Re:HAHA

[Proc6]

If you didn't notice the slowdown on your own, why would you change back just because someone said there is one of some kind?

Re:HAHA

[drinkypoo]

Changing one's key requires only the downloading and use of one small binary, or following a small number of steps in a text file (six or seven of them) but the binary will generate the keys for you. It displays them in a console window which closes automatically after you enter them. It is possible to get a bad code from it (one which will be invalid after the installation of sp1) but the OS will load nonetheless and inform you that it is bad, at which point you can just run it again, and change the code again.

Re:HAHA

[deadsaijinx*]

because when i installed winxp, sp1 was already out. So I never knew about the slow down. Seeing as how I do a lot of multimedia junk (3d modeling, video post production), I would appreciate the boost that was lost in SP1 due to the memory allocation bug.

or i could dl the hotfix. whichever works best.

Re:HAHA

[bonch]

Not on my old 266mhz. ;)

Typical Slashdot FUD

[MillionthMonkey]

This is really just more anti-Microsoft Slashdot FUD. After all, this only affects programs that allocate memory.

Programmers can easily work around this bug by returning right after printf("Hello World") finishes.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[addaon]

printf allocates money. Use fprintf directed to stderr, which doesn't buffer output. :-)

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[cscx]

On Windows I think stderr and stdout are one and the same.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[MillionthMonkey]

printf allocates money. Use fprintf directed to stderr, which doesn't buffer output. :-)

That's interesting. Who gets the money?

Of course fprintf() will be illegal soon since nobody can make any money off of it.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[elmegil]

This "thinking" must be new for you.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[MillionthMonkey]

Why the heck would anyone use printf for hello world?

Because Kernighan and Ritchie did, I guess.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

['The '.$L3mm1ng]

> On Windows I think stderr and stdout are one and
> the same.

There could be some truth in it, but it's not completely right:

c:\> perl -e "print STDERR 'foo'; print STDOUT 'bar';" > nul

Try this and you'll only see "foo" on the screen, because you redirect the output - output of STDOUT only.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[KewlPC]

He was making a joke.

Think about it for a bit; you'll get it eventually.

Re:Typical Slashdot FUD

[mentin]

Get a sense of humor, buddy.

The stament is blatant lie, but only to demostrate the blatant lie of parent post (that stderr == stdout on Windows).

"Service" Pack

[TheBigOh(n)]

Now I know why they call them service packs rather than upgrades. Apparently Microsoft doesn't even trust themselves.

Re:"Service" Pack

[use_compress]

You get serviced (like a horse)

Re:"Service" Pack

[Behrooz]

...or by a horse.

never installed sp1!

[capnjack41]

Whoo! Good thing I never installed SP1.

(actually, it's because I'm using XP with that pirated serial number that SP1 kindly "de-activates" for you)

Re:never installed sp1!

[Unregistered]

you use XP. Serves you right for piracy.

Re:never installed sp1!

[Quasar1999]

(actually, it's because I'm using XP with that pirated serial number that SP1 kindly "de-activates" for you)

Now honestly... do you not think that admitting to piracy (even on Slashdot) is not a rather stupid thing to do?

No wait... actually what I meant to say was, don't you think admitting to using Windows on Slashdot is a stupid thing to do? :P

Re:never installed sp1!

[the_2nd_coming]

dude....there is a work around for that.

get the entire service pack and then DL a new code generator package...I have it around here somewhere...I think it is on the hard drive of the computer that had the CPU fan fall off and subsiquently fried the CPU.....I have to get a USB drive case...I have so much crap on that drive.

Re:never installed sp1!

[ball-lightning]

I think it is on the hard drive of the computer that had the CPU fan fall off and subsiquently fried the CPU

Thanks for that, defintely having nightmares about that tonight :D

Re:never installed sp1!

[hdparm]

Not gonna work either. Try

IN5T4-LLM3T-0CR4P-UPURW-1ND0Z

Works as per SP1 specifications.

Re:never installed sp1!

[letxa2000]

My laptop came with XP pre-installed. Always bugged me that my most important Windows apps (Word, VB6 and VC++) all seemed to run SLOWER on a 1.3MHz Athlon with XP than they did under my previous laptop which was a 500Mhz Pentium II under Windows98.

Last month I totally upgraded to Linux on my new laptop. Since I occasionally do Windows contracts in VB6 or VC++ I purchased Win4Lin that allows me to run Windows apps under Linux. I would have been happy if it it had just worked, even if it was half as fast--after all, I don't plan on doing Windows development on a daily basis. However, as it turns out, all my Windows applications (Word, VB6, VC++, an Quicken99) all run FASTER under Win4Lin than they did on XP. I recently tried it. Word takes under 2 seconds to load under Win4Lin and on the same machine it takes 12 seconds under XP!

In all, I am now happily on Linux but for those cases where I have to use Windows applications they actually run FASTER now that I'm on Linux. Go figure.

Re:never installed sp1!

[Synic]

let us know when the lawyer letters arrive from MS

Re:never installed sp1!

[the_2nd_coming]

that is why when I get the funds to rebuild the sucker, I am going to get a HSF that uses the scew holes rather than the lugs.

Re:never installed sp1!

[Apro im]

Wow - if the paren'ts going to get into shit with microsoft lawyers, you're just screwed.

The fix will cost you

[Rick the Red]

You have to pay for Microsoft Product Support Services. From Knowledge Base Article 815411: "In special cases, charges that are ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem." May be canceled. Or maybe not. So it's entirely up to Microsoft whether or not to charge you for the fix to a problem they admit having! Of all the nerve.

Avoid Service Pack 1, or better yet, avoid Windows.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Guppy06]

"So it's entirely up to Microsoft whether or not to charge you for the fix to a problem they admit having! Of all the nerve."

Welcome to Microsoft's new "Captive Audience" pricing plan.

Remember kids, this is why monopolies that abuse their powers are bad.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Rick the Red]

Did you read the KB article? "To resolve this problem immediately, contact Microsoft Product Support Services to obtain the fix." Not, "go to Windows Update to obtain the fix." I'm sure you can download the fix for free, but finding out how requires a call to Support Services, which will cost you if you don't already have a support contract (in which case it already cost you). From the tone of the KB article it's clear they don't want just anyone downloading this fix -- I'm guessing it's not fully tested -- and they probably want the Support droids to try and talk you out of it.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Qrlx]

You've obviously never worked with PSS. If you want this hotfix, they will give it to you for free. You call PSS, say "I'm calling a known issue, Q so-and-so." They email you the hotfix in WinZip format and the password to unzip it.

They also helped me for free when I couldn't get Visual Studio .NET to install. About a thirty minute call there, including my callback to the support engineer.

Knock MS all you want, PSS is pretty effective.

Re:The fix will cost you

[mentin]

It is Oracle which uses the "Captive Audience" pricing plan - their user do have sign for service agreement (and pay for it) to download service packs and even security fixes.

Microsoft at least releases the fixes free.

Re:The fix will cost you

[lucifuge31337]

You've obviously never worked with PSS. If you want this hotfix, they will give it to you for free. You call PSS, say "I'm calling a known issue, Q so-and-so." They email you the hotfix in WinZip format and the password to unzip it.

And you're obviously and MCSE.
WinZip format....when will you paper engineers ever learn?

Re:The fix will cost you

[ergo98]

Errrr...it could very well be in WinZip self-extracting format which would thoroughly make you look like a pompous ahole.

Re:The fix will cost you

[cuban321]

No you don't have to do that. I've called for these patches plenty of times. Most of the time you don't even have to get past the person who answers the phone. They can email you instructions to get it instantly.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Guppy06]

"Microsoft at least releases the fixes free."

The title of this thread suggests otherwise, but even if we ignore this you're forgetting the cost of mandatory upgrades. I somehow doubt Microsoft would blatently refuse to support NT 4 before its end-of-life if it had to worry about competitors.

Re:The fix will cost you

[sowellfan]

Ok, this is OT, but this is the umpteenth post where somebody uses "and" when they mean "an". Is this a common grammatical mistake that people make (and I've maybe never heard the 'd' pronounced, even though the speaker was including it?), or just a really common typo? I don't think it's non-native English speakers, because I've noticed this a lot on a separate forum that is definitely native English speakers.

Re:The fix will cost you

[cookd]

They decided that one particular vulnerability wouldn't be fixed. That is not the same as refuse-to-support.

(And there are some decent reasons, even from the consumer's point of view, for why this one won't be fixed. So please just let it go.)

Re:The fix will cost you

[darien]

Typing quickly is pretty much a reflex; and "and" is one of the most common words in the language. So after typing "an," one's fingers tend to add on the "d" automatically. I think most people who type quickly have, on occasion, found themselves accidentally typing common words instead of the less common ones they intended.

Re:The fix will cost you

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

I have come across zip files that would only open in winzip. And he could very well mean a self-extracting archive.

Honestly, how is this flamebait insightful? Parent was more insightful despite the possible (or probable) typo regarding the format of the file.

This place is going to hell, I swear. If we're going to quibble about minor mistakes instead of focusing on the thrust of the arguments, then I could waste another three lines pointing out the ones you made in your post.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Rick the Red]

They also helped me for free when I couldn't get Visual Studio .NET to install.

Sure, they're desperate for .NET developers -- they'll bend over backwards to help anyone who's interested. I'm amazed they don't give Visual Studio .NET away free, but then they've always had a thing for making you pay them for, well, damn near anything.

Ask them for help when you can't get Flight Simulator or Office to install, and see if they're so free with their advice.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Jay L]

So it's entirely up to Microsoft whether or not to charge you for the fix to a problem they admit having!

In practice, though, this hasn't been a problem. I've written to PSS many times over the years to get hotfixes - or even just to report a bug and get confirmation that it's been logged - and never been charged for it. They've always acknowledged that my problem is due to their bug, and that means it's free.

I'm no fan of Microsoft's attitude and policies, but their support department is actually pretty decent as far as large-company consumer tech support goes, and when you run into someone who doesn't know what they're doing, it's easy to escalate your case. In fact, they even have a separate address you can write to to get your case escalated "outside of channels" if your tech support rep for some reason refuses.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Reziac]

And here I got flamed a couple years ago, when I said that this was exactly where M$ was headed -- that sooner or later, reactivation, service packs, patches, maybe even emergency hotfixes will no longer be free.

Captive Audience and pay per everything is *exactly* what M$ wants. They've made that very clear at their various seminars (which I attend regularly). I'd hazard a guess that the next consumer Windows will be oriented around that -- not so obviously, but by lock-in of services which eventually become subscription-only.

On a marginally related note, M$ stock recently split, so if you're buying, now's the time :)

Re:The fix will cost you

[Dave2 Wickham]

Yeah... I often find myself typing "porn" instead of "port"... Gets annoying ;).

Re:The fix will cost you

[Mage Powers]

thats the cause of ALL typoes ;)

Re:The fix will cost you

[Ashran]

IF they would release VS.NET for free everyone here would complain about MS releasing it for free to get everyone to develop for Windows .NET and thus hurting compentition.

Re:The fix will cost you

[0x0d0a]

They also helped me for free when I couldn't get Visual Studio .NET to install. About a thirty minute call there, including my callback to the support engineer.

Why did it take thirty minutes to figure out how to install VS .NET?

Re:The fix will cost you

[Rick the Red]

Oh, I don't know about that. They released gcc for free, but you don't see "everyone" developing for Linux or *BSD. (of course, you don't see anyone developing for Hurd :-)

Re:The fix will cost you

[Qrlx]

Why did it take thirty minutes to figure out how to install VS .NET?

I don't know if you've ever installed VS .NET (or a few other products like VFP 7) but the installer is a 3-step process. 1 is update system components, 2 is install the sw, 3 is check for updates. Every time I ran the installer it kept never making it to step 2.

There was probably something funny in the registry, not really sure. The solution was to run setup.exe /nobaseline or something like that. That switch as it turns out is documented in some KB article somewhere, and it makes setup skip the "update system components" step.

most of the thirty minutes was spent waiting for the installer to do Step 2, actually install the sw.

Re:The fix will cost you

[Qrlx]

Actaully I'm only MCP but thank you for the compliment!

You seem like the kind of person who pronounces "GIF" like "Jif."

hmmm

[Quasar1999]

I'm amazed they don't say it's not fixable and to wait and upgrade to Windows XP2 (or whatever the hell they call it when it comes out)...

Of course the other option is for 3rd party tools to come out that fix the bug in windows with an active patch (ie, patch the memory while it's running) and charge 49.95 for it... those memory doublers and optimizers from the windows 3.1 days come to mind....

w2k is effected as well

[Billly Gates]

Both Openoffice and Mozilla have slowed down quite alot with the latest security updates from Microsoft.

When I open openoffice is just sits there doing nothing for like 20 seconds and then launched. No excess cpu overhead or anything. It just stalls and then runs. Its just annoying and I wonder if its a conspiracy theory.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Re:w2k is effected as well

[Anonymous Coward]

It definitely is a conspiracy theory.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[archen]

Is it possible to tell if Mozilla runs slower? That's like determining the exact second the paint started to peel ;)

Re:w2k is effected as well

[randyest]

Yes, I have, a lot! I even have some very informal and unscientific benchmark results (counting 1-mississippi, 2-mississippi, . . after the double click until load) because not long before SP1 came along I was testing my system to see if changing my BIOS RAM timing made any diff on prg load times. It didn't, but I scratched the MS times (that's the state abbrev for mississippi, BTW, which I am quite tired of typing already) on some paper that, as they so often do, stayed on my desk past it's useful life.

After installing SP1 I immediately noticed longer load times. The load times are all, consistently, still the same, and noticeably longer than XP (pro, BTW) before SP1, which I used for almost a year (more?). I really started to take for granted sub-1s ie load times. Sigh. Anyway, here are the data:

ie: 1 MS max, every time. with SP1: 3-4 MS, depending on what else is up

adobe premiere 6.5: 7-9 MS, with SP1: 18-25 MS

excel xp with a 16MB spreadsheet (loaded from a shortcut to the sheet file): 20-25 MS. with SP1: 60-90 MS.

DVArchive (replay tv simulator, all in JAVA 1.4.1, a very slow-loading monkey): 30-35 MS. with SP1: 90-100 or tired of counting MS.

This sucks. Especially now that I know why, for the following reason. Before, I simply attributed the slow down to the mysterious hardware and software gremlins (and I'm an ASIC designer -- we know better than most just how real these critters really are -- ask me about typical chip testing coverage (90-98%), or to compare the MS bugs we cry about to the insane, random bugs in million-dollar EDA software from Cadence and Synopsys), but now I know that an upgrade that ostensibly should have improved system performance has instead worsened it, I'm bummed. Worse, there were some hassles with my (legit) corp key for XP with SP1, causing me quite a bit of hassle getting the thing installed to begin with.

OK, maybe SP1 made it more secure, or less crash-prone (wasn't bad before though, and doesn't seem better now), or something. Yes, I'll tell myself that -- something improved. I'm just not sure exactly what it is.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[Anonymous Coward]

You know it's serious when it causes w2k

Re:w2k is effected as well

[rabidcow]

Nor is anything else that was built with VC++ (or visual studio in general) and thus uses its implementation of malloc.

How do you know that? Link, please.

Even if everything that was compiled under Visual Studio used its malloc (which is not true), that still has to get the memory from the system sometime.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[Jugalator]

Yes, I'll tell myself that -- something improved. I'm just not sure exactly what it is.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=/su pport/ServicePacks/Windows/XP/SP1FixList.asp

Re:w2k is effected as well

[Jugalator]

Sorry, I was drunk when posting that one...

Categorized List of Fixes in Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1)

Re:w2k is effected as well

[gillbates]

When I open openoffice is just sits there doing nothing for like 20 seconds and then launched. No excess cpu overhead or anything. It just stalls and then runs

Happens to me too, except that I'm running Win95. I think that it's more like OpenOffice is just slow.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[KJKHyperion]

When I open openoffice is just sits there doing nothing for like 20 seconds and then launched. No excess cpu overhead or anything. It just stalls and then runs. Its just annoying and I wonder if its a conspiracy theory.

I'm experiencing the same issue. Only it happens with Explorer (seldom, at logon) and Outlook Express (always - luckily I don't use it), and it's been happening for a long, long time (but I blame myself and my obsession to reorganize hierarchically the whole Program Files folder...). They appear to be stuck in an invocation of NtReplyWaitReceivePortEx - and luckily the *Ex form of this system call can time out! - from some RPC runtime routine, but I never indagated the problem in depth

Re:w2k is effected as well

[loconet]

I've had something like that happen to me but with outlook express and win2k sp2.

*click* ... 1 min later ...it opens

Re:w2k is effected as well

[wkitchen]

ie: 1 MS max, every time. with SP1: 3-4 MS, depending on what else is up

3-4 MegaSeconds? Wow, that IS a long load time!

Re:w2k is effected as well

[nusuth]

I recently decided to switch and ported one of my WIPs to linux. The program allocates about 400MB memory on startup in its default configuration. After working around the compiler differences, I ran it and immediatly went back to searching for the bug. The program started up much faster than the windows version. It took a lot of tests to convince myself the program was indeed operating as requested. I knew that malloc on SMP systems with NT wasn't very well performing but the difference with linux (2.4.20) was something like 5000%

The moral is, switch, although getting your fonts right will take a week, you will be pleasently surprised every once in a while.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[randyest]

You're kidding right? I did explain the MS thing in the post. And megaseconds would be "Ms", not "MS".

Re:w2k is effected as well

[Bull999999]

I guess my Red Hat Linux 8.0 also has XP SP1 installed. Open Office takes forever to load on it.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[Lord Flipper]

OK, maybe SP1 made it more secure, or less crash-prone (wasn't bad before though, and doesn't seem better now), or something. Yes, I'll tell myself that -- something improved. I'm just not sure exactly what it is.

Only thing i really noticed is the presence of the MS Virtual Machine update that allows the real JAVA Virtual Machine to run

Re:w2k is effected as well

[FredFnord]

No, that's a magazine.

-fred

Re:w2k is effected as well

[wkitchen]

You're kidding right?

Yes. I'm sorry if I didn't make that apparent enough.

Re:w2k is effected as well

[randyest]

it's OK. I thought so, but you can never be too sure on ./ :)

quality

[tabby]

More good work from MS's 'does it compile?' quality assurance program

Re:quality

[miratrix]

I genuinely am surprised that something like this could've slipped through the cracks.

Service Packs are suppose to be stable, extensively tested set of updates unlike hotfixes, and the bug description makes it sound like it could be a programming logic error, not a programming bug. I mean, they must've noticed *something* if certain programs take up to 10 times as long...

Re:quality

[elmegil]

But see, only third party software actually has to use the documented interfaces to allocate memory, and so they're the only ones affected.

Re:quality

[mcpkaaos]

I mean, they must've noticed *something* if certain programs take up to 10 times as long...

Consider the suite of applications they would likely be running in their test: IE 6, Word, Excel, DevStudio, VB, etc. Really now, who would notice?

It's like the Smell the Glove album cover. I mean, how much more black could it be? Like, none more black...

mcp.kaaos

Re:quality

[robfoo]

Maybe they got the guys who built New Zealand's America's Cup boat to code it.

You know the guys, they built the boat that couldn't handle water, wind or waves - they'd never thought to test it in anything but perfect conditions, so first time out it filled up with water, and broke a boom.

Same things goes here - Obviously M$ didn't test it with programs that use memory.. most M$ programs seem to use disk instead anyway... :p

Re:quality

[Azureflare]

No no, see, that's just a feature!! It was meant to do that!!! *hasty buttcovering here*

Man, microsoft seems to be getting a lot of bad press lately, what with the NT 4 fiasco and now this. They certainly deserve it though, We should not be praising them for making things go slower and not supporting products they said they would. Makes me wonder what windows 2003 server will be like...

Re:quality

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't pay attention to the generally sorry state of QA in general for commercial programs and their service packs. From personal experience with companies who shall remain nameless, several customers actually fear service packs coming out. Sure, they're required. Sure, they often fix long-standing bugs. Sure, they might add needed functionality. But from what I've seen, the QA process is often along the lines of rubberstamping the release in order to meet an arbitrary deadline set by someone who thinks it's more of a negative impact to delay a release by a week than it is to make sure said release works, let alone works well.

Case in point, Anonymous Company recently released a service pack on-time which had supposedly been through QA. What happened when customers installed it? Their systems relying on this software suddenly stopped working, or started corrupting data. How could this have slipped past QA? Simple. QA in most places is usually composed of people who can't figure out how to map a network drive when given the complete \\machine\path\to\map along with the necessary username and password. And yet these are the people who are supposed to make sure everything works before being released, risking the wrath of management if they say "No, we can't do that."

(Posted anonymously to protect the guilty)

Re:quality

[WhiteBandit]

Buahaha! And all you people saying "Who the hell needs an Athlon XP 2800+???"

So that's why Mozilla's been slow...

[Anonymous Coward]

Once it's using 250+ megs of memory after a week of continuous use, it becomes a real beast. Apparently, I'm not supposed to use Mozilla for a week at a time without closing it though...

Re:So that's why Mozilla's been slow...

[I Am The Owl]

That's called a "memory leak". It comes from the Mozilla team not freeing allocated memory when they are supposed to.

Re:So that's why Mozilla's been slow...

[Unregistered]

I've gotten it up to 680 MB before it crashed. (I have 768mb RAM)

Re:So that's why Mozilla's been slow...

[digitalhermit]

Memory leaks are often caused when using streaming applications because they tend to use a lot of bandwidth, causing your internet "pipe" to have what's known to us programmers as an "overflow condition". This problem is often exacerbated by having too many open ports. On Linux and BSD you can generally fix memory leaks by applying a tarball with the "patch" utility to the affected server.

Memory leaks were very common in older systems that used 'bubble memory' and lots of pointers.

Other things you can try are entering the BIOS and turning off the "memory hole". This is unnecessary for everything but OS/2 anyway. If you do need to keep the memory hole, you can try using the "finger" utility to plug the hole. This method is popular with Netherlands programmers.

HTH.

Re:So that's why Mozilla's been slow...

[TheRaven64]

Actually, no. The reason Mozilla is slow after allocating a lot of memory is due to the way in which the NT disk cache works. To oversimplfy:

Windows uses almost all of main memory as a disk cache, and the swap file as program memory. This is in theory a good idea, since it eliminates the need for manually tweaking the size of a disk cache, maintaining concurrecny with swap files, and other virtual memory headaches. If a RAM page is accessed frequenty, then it will never be committed to the disk, but instead stay in the cach (which is you main memory - still with me?).

If you have a lot of disk I/O throughput then the amount of memory used for this will grow, and allocated memory will be swapped to disk. For an application with a lot of allocated memory, the probability of a page being swapped out will be high, and so it will have to be reloaded before it can restart.

You can identify the processes which are causing a lot of I/O throughput in the task manager.

"a" flaw?

[RawDigits]

Windows XP's Service Pack 1 has introduced a flaw into the operating system.

Drat, just when we all thought windows had achieved perfection. Back to the Visio board...

Bloated

[DJ Rubbie]

Each component in Windows is so intertwined together that when one thing needs to be fixed, the a few other pieces breaks, which must be fixed, therefore more pieces break and it will get to a point when all pieces break and it is better off to run NT4, as Microsoft stopped breaking it.

Re:Bloated

[goonda]

I don't think they've quite finished with breaking it: http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/5WP0O1P9F A.html With something like 30-40% of m$ customers still running WinNT, is this responsible corporate citizenship?

Re:Bloated

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

... it will get to a point when all pieces break and it is better off to run NT4, as Microsoft stopped breaking it.

No, no... They stopped fixing it. That's different, y'see. :-)

Re:Bloated

[Captain Nitpick]

... it will get to a point when all pieces break and it is better off to run NT4, as Microsoft stopped breaking it.

No, no... They stopped fixing it. That's different, y'see. :-)

"If it ain't broke, fix it until it is"

Re:Bloated

[tuxedobob]

You mean like shattering a window? Heeyyy......

Simular Problems

[Xerin]

I've had simular problems since I installed SP1, but only with installshield applications. It takes about 5-10 minutes for installshield to start, it just hangs in limbo. Kind of answers alot of questions of why Mozila(spelling) wasn't usable at times.

Where you can find this patch...

[phreak404]

Here: http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=9815&categor y=main

Re:Where you can find this patch...

[jafisherton]

Click this instead of copying and pasting. http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=9815&categor y=main

I'm sure no one is interested but...

[JSmooth]

Here's a link to the file:

http://home.t-online.de/home/520092137223-0001/x p/ Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

Re:I'm sure no one is interested but...

[vandan]

Oh golly gosh. Some kind soul has posted a patch to solve all my problems.
I must click on it right away even though the poster doesn't know how to insert a hyperlink into a web page.

I've wondered about that...

[ackthpt]

Execution is pretty fast on my AMD XP2600+, it seems like it wades through bloated MS code pretty well, but even with the fast HDD and everything, program loading is inexplicably slow, and the drive hasn't had enough time to get seriously fragmented, so I was wondering. Probably should order a 160GB drive and get busy installing Manduck Linux 9...

Typical

[alofron]

MS' trend to introduce programming flaws into SP for it's OS range of products is well known and well documented. Remember the NT4 SP5 problems ?
It's not a bad idea. 'Flaws' like that force users to upgrade their systems into the next SP. And then the next SP. Until the next major release of the Window OS is introduced to the market.
Providing flaws into it's products Microsoft secures that their customers are always following it's lead, guidelines, marketing plans and so on.
Hardly surprisingly. Just succesful corporate policy.

Show me the mirror!

[TBone]

Anyone have this patch hosted somewhere?

Re:Show me the mirror!

[TBone]

And I answer my own question... :) http://www.warp2search.net/article.php?sid=11377

Have seen this

[IanBevan]

We have seen this exact behaviour when benchmarking our heap management product. Although our software is targetted at multithreaded software and multiprocessor machines, we've been surprised to see it improve performance of non-multithreaded programs by so much on XP. We've seen it speed up single threaded applications on Windows 2000 too, but not by so much.

And please, before somebody gets started with a flame war, WinHeap is not open source (although there is a source code license available), but it is free for non-profit use.

Re:Have seen this

[0x0d0a]

I was about to post a nasty post about how crummy Microsoft is -- a *third party* is charging money to fix their lousy memory management system.

Then I remembered Ram Doubler on the Mac.

Proprietary OSes. Sigh.

Reminds Me of Python-Esque Humor

[mistermund]

This patch, along with the fact that MS won't be releasing a patch for that recent gaping hole in NT4, reminds me of a scene...

(Read along in a mock British-imitating-French accent, ala the castle scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail)

Microsoft Engineer: We've got a problem here, chaps!
MS Users (All, Amongst Selves): Well, how about a patch then?
Microsoft Engineer: Uh, we've already got one, you see.
MS User 1: Are you sure he's got one?
MS User 2: He says they've already got one!
Microsoft Engineer: Oh, yes. It's very nice-a.
MS Engineers: [chuckling]
MS Users: Well, u-- um, can we come up and have a look?
MS Engineer: Of course not! You are clueless types-a!
MS Users: If you will not show us the patch, we shall switch all our systems to Linux!
MS Engineer: You don't frighten us, clueless pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Linux King, you and all your silly open source k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
MS User 1: What a strange person.
MS User 2: Now look here, my good man--
MS Engineer: I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
MS Users: Is there someone else up there we could talk to?
MS Engineer: No. Now, go away, or I shall taunt you a second time-a! [sniff]

(With aplogies to Monty Python)
Script here.

Re:Reminds Me of Python-Esque Humor

[SecretAsianMan]

The things people will do to get karma...

Re:Reminds Me of Python-Esque Humor

[MisterFancypants]

Monty Python just isn't funny. Never was, never will be.

Re:Reminds Me of Python-Esque Humor

[darien]

Ah, solipsism.

Memory Management???

[wideBlueSkies]

What the hell did they have to go and touch that for? Was is broken?

Yeah, so the new Microsoft standard malloc() and takes 10 times as long to load as the old version. But with this increase in time, the customer can be sure that the memory allocations are being done more securly, and in a way that's good for them.

Also as a bonus, no more pesky free()'s. When that memory gets allocated, it STAYS allocated untill you (have to) reboot your system.

More /. FUD.

[tshak]

My first experience with XP (no pun intended) was just a few weeks ago with my new laptop. Everything about it is faster than my workstation. True, my workstation has a slower CPU, but it also has a significantly faster harddrive, which is usually the bottleneck for loadtimes. XP boots way faster, loads programs noticeably faster, and has a more responsive GUI even considering the more resource intensive graphics. So, if in fact there is a bug in XP that slows the loading of some programs down, then that just means that SP2 will make things even faster.

Oh, and let's not talk about load times for X window managers. Even with XP's "bug" KDE nor Gnome stand a chance*.

* Disclaimer: this is based on my experience RH8. I'm currently downloading the Mandrake 9.1 ISO's (slowly... mirrors are hammered) so my observation is not taking into account potential performance improvements made recently.

Re:More /. FUD.

[Unregistered]

RH and drake are slow. I'll give you that. Also linux doesn't depend on the HDD as much since it uses ram more efficiantly. Also, GNOME and KDE are huge. It's the eye candy. Windows still has a really simple interface, even luna. it's bubbly, but not complex. If you want fast, check out Enlightenment or fluxvbox. Also using a distro like gentoo will speed thing up a lot.

Re:More /. FUD.

[madcow_ucsb]

Of course you've only had the XP on there for a few weeks - give it a few months before you suddenly realize that it's taking 3 min to boot and progs take twice as long to open. And no amount of defragging or registry clearing seems to fix it... :(

Linux may be slower initially, but at least it doesn't do that windows thing where your box gets slower by the day. I'll take consistancy, thank you very much.

Re:More /. FUD.

[the_2nd_coming]

peh...you know what, the thing that still pisses me off is that I still do not come to a 100% usable desktop after log in and my debian system loads so much faster than XP.....just wait, it slows down as time goes on.

Re:More /. FUD.

[zenyu]

Oh, and let's not talk about load times for X window managers. Even with XP's "bug" KDE nor Gnome stand a chance*.
* Disclaimer: this is based on my experience RH8. I'm currently downloading the Mandrake 9.1 ISO's

If you really want to see KDE startup fly try gentoo. Compile aggressively, on my laptop I have:

CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -O3 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -mfpmath=sse -m3dnow -foptimize-sibling-calls -fstrength-reduce -fcse-follow-jumps -fcse-skip-blocks -frerun-cse-after-loop -frerun-loop-opt -fgcse -fdelete-null-pointer-checks -funroll-loops -falign-functions=64 -falign-loops=4 -pipe"

gentoo will mask out dangerous optimizations where they really are dangerous (like the kernel). But, you might not want to risk something like -ffast-math if you chart orbits for NASA using bc... The align-functions and align-loops should probably be 32 & 3 resp, for my xp, but I lifted these from my P4 with minor modification. (For P4 you want those alignments and -msse2 -march=pentium4 & not -march=athlon-xp -m3dnow, gcc can explain them better than I, and some of these are actually redundant with -O3, but its good to still have them listed if you want to make one of them a "no-" option or make it -O2, cuz you know something about the package.)

And THEN, run

prelink -afmR

The startup time of C++ programs in Linux is usually so slow because of all the dynamic linking that gcc encourages by making it the default. Prelinking changes the binaries and libraries so that this can be done faster (the linker will default to full relinking if any of the libraries an application requires changes after you run prelink). You can probably run prelink on a modern distribution like MDK 9.1 so you might just want to try it there. But gentoo has really breathed new life into my laptop, it just managed a single DVD quality stream with MDK 9, with gentoo I can play a DVD while looping the 1024 pixel wide matrix reloaded trailer as my X background, and still I can continue to use my laptop without any problem (aside from battery drain...)

Re:More /. FUD.

[Mattsson]

Well... Actually, it's not /. FUD.

1.
It's being reported in other places than /.
I first read about it in the newspaper...

2.
It's being reported on Microsofts own website.
So maybe it's microsoft FUD? =)

3.
The problem actually exists. (Thus is not FUD)
It doesn't appear on *every* XP computer with SP1, but some actually load programs at 1/10 the speed that they did without SP1.

Even on /. some bad news about Microsoft turns out to be true. =)

Re:More /. FUD.

[GiMP]

Wow, things must have changed quite a bit if Enlightenment is considered fast! Back when FVWM was the windowmanager of choice, Enlightenment was the definition of bloat (right next to emacs).

Re:More /. FUD.

[zsmooth]

I've been running XP since RC2 and it's still fast. So are you speaking from experience with XP or (more likely) just parrotting the slashdot line?

Re:More /. FUD.

[eht]

FUD is anything, including absolutely true things, that increase Fear, Uncertainty, and/or Doubt.

Blowing things out of proportion is one facet of whether or not something qualifies as FUD.

Re:More /. FUD.

[tshak]

If it doesn't perform off the shelf, practically speaking it doesn't perform period.

Re:More /. FUD.

[tshak]

The problem actually exists. (Thus is not FUD)


I never said the problem doesn't exist. My point was that this is catagorically "/. FUD" because although the problem exists, it's practically unnoticeable and it's not that big of a deal.

Re:More /. FUD.

[zenyu]

If it doesn't perform off the shelf, practically speaking it doesn't perform period.

I never said Mandrake was as slow as WindoZZZe. When I tried playing a DVD with the pre-installed DVD player it skipped like crazy, it didn't even come close to Mandrake in performance, much less Gentoo.

As far as prelinking goes this would improve load times for Windows binaries too, but probably not as much because in Linux distributions the distributor gets to compile the programs so they go for dynamic linking, decreasing the memory efficiency and shrinking security update download times. Remember when a zlib bug was found? Practically every statically linked application had to be patched including MS Word. The point of gentoo is that if you have shitloads of RAM and want quick startup times you can take the Microsoft approach (just put "static" in you USE variable.). The second point was that if you're using Linux there are innovative tools like pre-linking that will get you faster load times at the cost of running a command after installs or nightly if you like. This is superior to static linking because you still get the efficiency of Linux with the load times of a large monolothic Windows program.

There are places where Windows XP is better, like the startup time of the OS, they even have a tool for optimizing this. They do this at the cost of a hellishly slow shutdown time. But I bet if we worried about startup time a little we could shorten it without the cost at shut-down. Just figuring out the disk access pattern at startup and providing a hook in the kernel for drivers to look up cached info might go a long way...(and we should time startup to, without a metric the developers won't think about the 20 msec their server takes to startup.. unless they see it takes longer than someone else's similar server.) OS Startup time just hasn't been a priority until now that Windows NT is starting to compete, it's good for the community that they are. BSD will probably ignore it and do things the "UNIX Way" for a while, but if we don't mess up they'll come around and "do it right."

Re:More /. FUD.

[Mattsson]

I'm not affected by the problem.
But I think that it would be a tad bit irritating if a program that usually takes, say, 6 seconds to load instead took 60 seconds.
For me, IExplorer takes about 1 - 2 seconds to start. If it instead took 10 - 20 seconds all of sudden, it would be annoying.

I agree with you that it is *not* a critical fault, but it could lead to quite some amount of stress if it's an application that you use alot.

wasn't xp by itself already bad enough.

[eenglish_ca]

Why does MS keep releasing new software when each time it is worse than the last release. Maybe if they rereleased old updates then things might start to speed up.

Re:wasn't xp by itself already bad enough.

[Blaine Hilton]

Probably job security. They have to have people that patch the patches to the those other patches that were ment to fix the O/S.

And another thing... why 32-bit color?

[Stardate]

By default even?!?! This slows down things A LOT compared to 16-bit color. Even 24-bit color is only necessary for artists and graphics designers. When you bring up or close the Start Menu it takes valuable time to redraw everything underneath.

MS should be focusing on improving the desktop XPerience like Linux is with the work in 2.6 to improve interactivity.

Re:And another thing... why 32-bit color?

[stratjakt]

You're caught in a time warp.

As a sibling post pointed out, most recent cards are 32 bit native. Most are much faster in 32 bit than 16 bit mode.

Get yourself a newer radeon and run 3DMarks and other benches in 32bit and then 16bit to convince yourself.

Re:And another thing... why 32-bit color?

[mythr]

On x86 architectures (your PC), as well as most others, 24 bit color is actually slower than 32 bit. Sure, it takes up 25% more memory, but since memory operations involving more than one byte are generally aligned to a fullword (32 bit) boundary, it can take more operations to deal with each pixel using 24 bit color. In the end, I think you'd find that this makes your desktop even more sluggish than all of those wasted bytes do.

I knew it.

[Hershmire]

SecureCRT takes forever to start up.

So I suppose SP1 is to XP as beer is to me: a tool to slow your reaction time. Too bad it doesn't make XP more attractive...

Re:I knew it.

[FredFnord]

If it were a strict sort of parallel, it would make YOU more attractive TO XP, or possibly to your computer.

I hope you don't keep your computer in the bedroom...

-fred

win 2000 flaw

[Fuzzums]

my last uodate of win2k has introduced a flaw on my os that causes it to slow down when releasing the system for a shutdown.

before the update: about 10 secs.
after the update: over one minute.

I solved this issue in FuzQ0000001
use the powerswitch to shut down the computer.

More mirrors for Patch

[N8F8]

Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe

Re:More mirrors for Patch

[Mattsson]

Eum... Is this patch availible somewhere for other languages than English?
I would need a Swedish version. =)

(I can't belive that MS hasn't stopped using different binaries for different languages yet. It's idiotic. They even *rename* systemfiles and folders between languages, making some poorly made programs incompatible with other languages than English...)

That explains it

[jkirby]

This explains why my Acrobat reader is crawling. I installed the fix and now all is back to normal.

Patch available for download

[Radi-0-head]

You can get the English and German language patches from here, and probably several other sites if you search for it.

Enjoy.

If this is such a big deal�

[Anonymous Coward]

...why is it taking six months to learn the news. No one noticed their program startups taking TEN TIMES longer? I haven't noticed. How about providing a list of said programs and some benchmarks with these headlines? I'm not here to defend Microsoft, but I suspect the scope of the problem is limited and can wait till SP2 for most users.

Re:Here's a thought...

[PhoenixFlare]

Here's another thought...Wait until you (or someone trustworthy) has actual evidence of something like that, before spouting off?

Linux is cool, I have a dual-boot set up myself, but- I cannot reliably run 99% of the Windows games and many other programs i've spent hundreds of dollars on under Linux. Hence, I and many others like me can't just switch over to an all-Linux box, just because the Man at Microsoft might be slipping nasty stuff in that there's no evidence of.

I'm such a whore

[alexburke]

Why bother asking Microsoft for the patch? Here you go. :)

Re:Here's a thought...

[Rew190]

No, because the majority of users don't really care what's actually in the update, the user mentality is that all updates are good and one should snatch them up as often as possible. I highly doubt your average user even knows what DRM is.

Downloads/Patches Right Here -- i386/Alpha

[mattyohe]

Just because im a nice guy...

http://www.paricom.com/matt/xphotfix/

RTFriendlyKBA

[hackwrench]

This particular fix requires calling Technical support to get. It's even in the Slashdot article!

windows Slows Down My PC!

[MMHere]

Is that why I have to go get a shiny new 3GHz Pentium 4 -- so I can start Office 2003 by the time the afternoon is out?

Ahhh...

[ghack]

No wonder my 1.53GHz Athlon has been so slow lately...

what so unusiual

[Brigadier]

Historically speaking this makes it an upgrade ...

LOL

[grolschie]

Good one! :-)

I haven't noticed any problems so far

[gearloose]

I've been running SP1 since it was released and I haven't ran into any programs hanging for extended periods of time or taking up 10 times more memory. Is there a list of programs somewhere that documents this problem to a specific application?

Re:I haven't noticed any problems so far

[BrainInAJar]

Ever seen svchost.exe in your tasklist? bugger takes up nearly 95% of my CPU if the computer's been running more than a day.

If I kill it, it's fine, but i can't prevent the issue

Re:I haven't noticed any problems so far

[insecuritiez]

scvhost.exe is the service host. It it itself is not the problem, one of the services it is running is. The problem with killing scvhost is that it will terminate other importaint services that may also be running with it. Often simular services are all run under one instance of scvhost. What you should do is go to your services snap-in (right click on "My Computer" then choose manage, make your way to the services snap-in) and tone down and unnecisarry services. There are many of them. One of them is the culprit of the extra memory and processor usage. It is most likely a 3rd party service, since I have never seen an MS service really fail that bad. Hope that works.

Re:I haven't noticed any problems so far

[spongman]

run 'msconfig', go to the 'Services' tab, check 'Hide all Microsoft Services', disable all of the remaining services, reboot.

way to install sp1 when your serial key isnt legit

[Indy1]

http://www.petri.co.il/change_xp_serial.htm

then do a google search for a program called "xp key recoverer and discoverer 5.12"

enjoy your product activation free xp

Some patch...

[HeavensTrash]

Excellent work. This patch didn't work in the least, and infact broke my XP causing me to restore from an older version. For some reason, the patch refused to find ntdll.dll, even though it was in the specified directory - After pointing the path to a few other directories which also had this file, it still refused, so I had to cancel. Cancelling it warned would cause your computer to stop working. Well, it did. Screw this patch, I'll just have to deal with the lag for now.

Ah, Finally!!!

[jlrowe]

Finally Microsoft has a fix to slow down the spread of Code Red and other MS related worms and virii.

Sure, it has some side effects, but don't all fixes?

Re:Well, I am not installing XP SP1 anyway...

[mabinogi]

It's ok, it just refuses to install SP1, it doesn't invalidate your product key.

Mirror of the Patch

[mraymer]

I mirrored the file on my server in a futile effort to reduce the /. effect on the other links that were posted.

Enjoy!

http://home.centurytel.net/mraymer/Q815411_WXP_SP2 _x86_ENU.exe

really nice fast mirror

[stephenb]

If you're looking for a nice fast mirror:

patch

Re:really nice fast mirror

[bezza]

That domain name gives me a whole heap of confidence when choosing a download site. Thanks!

Re:Downloads/Patches Right Here -- i386/Alpha

[Soko]

Whoa, whoa whoa. Hold it right there. Alpha patches? For WinXP?

You , sir, are one of two things:

1.- You are an evil cracker who is tempting people into downloading your latest Trojan Badger^WHorse code so you can r007 them and be a 1337 h4x0r. Except they'd actually have to be for NT4 to run at all, you fucking lamer.

2. - You are a Microsoft engineer who has XP running on the Alpha processor. Which means Microsoft still supports the Alpha internaly, and Compaq needn't of killed it. I could have had an EV8!!!

In either case, you can expect your next of kin to recieve a very large bill for beer, .44 magnum shells and dry cleaning. I refuse to pay one red cent towards dragging you into the street by the hair, shooting you and then pissing in the 6 craters I will have just created in your body.

HAND.

Soko

(Still mourning the Alpha)

Info & Link

[mallfouf]

I did install the patch, and there is a major difference in speed.
Here's more information about the issue, and a link for download. Please, post mirrors.
Info & Patch

THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINKS

[mattyohe]

What you can do is call 1-800-936-4900 which is Microsoft's Hotfix Line.. Tell them the Q article and they will pull it up and send a link in your email.

But I have already done this for you.. And I didn't forget you alpha users!

http://www.paricom.com/matt/xphotfix

XP SP1 Slowdown

[aSiTiC]

I don't know about anyone else but I noticed a fairly noticable slowdown in XP when I installed SP1. I've since uninstalled SP1.

Personally I prefer speed over security.

Re:XP SP1 Slowdown

[PhxBlue]

Which is all well and good, since let's face it, you weren't really getting all that much "security" anyway.

Found a patch link.

[evilcanaduhguy]

Did a little googling and found a mirror hosting the patch for this problem. http://home.t-online.de/home/520092137223-0001/xp/ Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe Enjoy!

Re:You call this "News"???

[aSiTiC]

" This is "News" in the same sense as the last suicide bombing in a string of about one per week for the last 2 years. "

I'm glad you have so easily simplified suicide/homicide bombings to everyday news. A sad "sign of the times" that we live in.

One other major problem

[AsnFkr]

I work in a local computer repair shop, and 30% or so of the computers we load SP1 on stop booting properly. No safe mode, no VGA mode, just a wipe and reload. They boot then restart as soon as they should be getting to the desktop, caught in a eternal loop. Unless it is specifically requested by the user, I definatly don't load it. Thats just the major of many other problems we have come across with SP1.

Re:One other major problem

[Indy1]

usually because lusers load their boxes up with spyware and a whole bunch of other shit that autoloads, which causes massive problems with any major upgrade. I've plonked sp1 on a whole lot of different machines, and its been my experience that as long as the underlying os is fairly clean and not
mucked with 8 tons of garbage (the above mentioned spyware), it installs fine.

Re:One other major problem

[AsnFkr]

I agree with that to a certian point but just today I loaded a freah load of xp home, slammed all the driver updates on, then loaded sp1. No more booty. Theres no rhyme nor reason to it sometimes.

Another major problem we have seen with SP1 is after it is loaded, copying large chunks of data out of differant directories end with a "cannot read from source disk" error. It makes backing up all *.doc files or *.jpg files in one full swoop after a file search a really big pain. ...Grumble grumble....

This would have been the first post ...

[Mikey-San]

But due to the Service Pack update, IE took ten times longer to launch! ;-D

-/-
Mikey-San

The only thing that slows me down in XP...

[Thaidog]

...are blue screens... which strangely increase my aplication time on my Mac... go figure!

Seriously... XP pro blue screens all the time on my Dual athlon box... I heard it was issues with the AMD chipset... win2k, however works just fine...

Re:The only thing that slows me down in XP...

[BrainInAJar]

I have yet to see XP bluescreen.

Prolly either a bad install, or bad ram/chipset. or a shitty motherboard (soyo what?)

Re:The only thing that slows me down in XP...

[Thaidog]

No... it's the chipset.... at least that's what I've heard... plus I've got about 15 trillon pci cards that support about 15 trillion different devices...
Win2k works fine for everything... I hope AMD comes out with another atlon board to fix all this... with a 333 fsb... that would be nice... Tyan rma's boards like mine 5 times a day so the rummor goes

Re:The only thing that slows me down in XP...

[Assembler]

I had the same problem. All I had to do was flash the bios on my motherboard with the newest revision and all was well.

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[TheSHAD0W]

Umm... I called that number and got a 404 error. I think it's been Slashdotted.

Has anyone actually witness this slow down?

[antdude]

I haven't on my machines and test machines at home and office with various softwares. Are there any known programs or games that does show this?

Re:Has anyone actually witness this slow down?

[mallfouf]

I did notice the slowdown.
XP took longer to boot. Some applications also took longer, like AOL, and some games.
I downloaded the patch, and everything ran faster. I'm playing C&C Generals at the moment, and the game did run a lot faster after installing the patch.

Re:Has anyone actually witness this slow down?

[antdude]

I hope Battlefield 1942 is faster in loading. That game is a disk hog. ;)

Re:Downloads/Patches Right Here -- i386/Alpha

[Diamondback]

they're for the itanium. pay attention.

Download link...

[PhrostyMcByte]

found it here: http://www.softodrom.ru/get.php?id=3942

another update, and it's not even monday..

A Windows Flaw?

[I-R-Baboon]

I thought this was an added feature, to give you plenty of time to make sure you want to open this program and get a cup of coffee like the good old days...

Re:Downloads/Patches Right Here -- i386/Alpha

[atam]

I think the original poster misunderstood the patch. From the look of the patch file name Q815411_WXP_SP2_ia64_ENU.exe, it is actually for Windows XP 64-Bit Edition, i.e. the Itanic, rather than Alpha.

Not so fast!

[twitter]

Finally Microsoft has a fix to slow down the spread of Code Red and other MS related worms and virii.

All worms? I think not! The dreaded FORTRAN worm, with it's one time memory alocation, pass by reference only and spritish math library will make mince meat of all the usual holes. Ha!

Release candidates

[Tomster]

It is plain that Microsoft's internal testing is insufficient. I don't really fault them for this -- it's simply impossible to have enough configurations, testcases, and procedures to cover more than a small percentage of the actual ways the product is used.

IMO, Microsoft would benefit by issuing public release candidates for new OS versions and patches. It would greatly reduce the impact of problems with patches and new releases.

-Thomas

Re:Release candidates

[Mish]

I can and do fault them for this.

I'm currently (as in the last month or so) talking to MS trying to get them to release a bugfix for IE...

Anyone with XP and SP1 installed go to this page: http://doomx.net/test/multi.html and experience the pain.

If you have 'a lot' of the same image repeating on a webpage (like in a generic forum) you'll probably have seen this.

The more times the same image is repeated the more likely this is to occur.

If that wasn't enough if you've got IE5+ and Media Player 7 installed people can mess with your CDROM drive and lockup IE (no patch yet for this either):

http://doomx.net/test/test.jpg

Re:Release candidates

[Clockwurk]

Fascinating, I'm kind of wondering what effect the repeated image is supposed to have??? It doesn't seem to do anything on my XP+SP1 box though? I see all the number up through 5, am I missing something?

On another note, how exactly does that JPEG link work? The effect is badass, but what is the code involved??

Re:Release candidates

[Mish]

The JPEG is actually a vbscript that uses a windows media player control to access the CDROM drive.

Try refreshing the multi.html page, as I mentioned above, after XPSP1 (actually the IE6SP1 which is included in it) is installed if the same image is repeated a lot in one page then IE just shows the place holder or the "Image Error" icon.

Re:Release candidates

[fiftyfly]

It is plain that Microsoft's internal testing is insufficient. I don't really fault them for this -- it's simply impossible to have enough configurations, testcases, and procedures to cover more than a small percentage of the actual ways the product is used. IMO, Microsoft would benefit by issuing public release candidates for new OS versions and patches. It would greatly reduce the impact of problems with patches and new releases.

Gee, and here I sat thinking that M$'s blatant lack of testing & quality control (I mean, htf did they miss this one, surely somebody noticed?) was a sure indication that 'service packs' == release candidates. A little 'fix' here, some liberal pathing there, a nifty hack there - done! Release it to those rabid pirates^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hloyal consumers.

Re:Release candidates

[Zarquon]

I've seen that behavior with the 'friend/foe/neutral' dot here on slashdot.

Re:Release candidates

[Fweeky]

IMO, Microsoft would benefit by issuing public release candidates for new OS versions

Huh? I thought that's what alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc.ms-beta was for. Isn't it official?!?

<looks shocked>

Re:Release candidates

[korgull]

I bet you don't use a PC for real jobs otherwise you would care about the OS quality.

And who the hell would help MS testing a product ? What do you gain for doing their job ? Will you get large price reduction as a tester ?

Re:Release candidates

[Jugalator]

Had anyone here heard about the slowdown problem before it made the news? No? I really wonder how common it is in reality... And if it's very uncommon, I wouldn't go as far as saying their test procedures are insufficient just because of this.

Re:Release candidates

[nbvb]

Hrm, worked fine here with Safari on OSX and Mozilla on Solaris.... dunno what your problem is...

Oh wait, yes I do. The OS.

Re:Release candidates

[sheldon]

Interesting. I see no problems.

It's very likely something specific to your machine, most likely a video driver issue.

Re:Release candidates

[sheldon]

"IMO, Microsoft would benefit by issuing public release candidates for new OS versions and patches."

Umm... they do.

For new OS versions it's called the Customer Preview Program. They've been doing this since at least Win95. In addition there are thousands involved even earlier in the process with the beta.

For servicepacks, the distribution is a bit more limited and they only go out to beta members as well as partners and such. Windows 2000 SP4 Beta Invites Sent

Hotfixes are more difficult, because they suffer from rapid release. They're rolled up into service packs, which then go through the public testing process.

Re:Release candidates

[Dave2 Wickham]

Anyone with XP and SP1 installed go to this page

*rolls eyes*

Re:Release candidates

[ssstraub]

I get the image not found error after 02 I think. Good thing I don't use IE for anything but windows update, thanks to Phoenix.

Who freakin' cares. . .

[bplipschitz]

don't all /. readers run Linux or *BSD anyway?

This is *news*?

This is not really news

[tsphere]

Every new release of windows runs slower than the one before. Looks to me like MS is trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Re:This is not really news

[boer]

Have you by the way noticed that every new Linux desktop release is slower than the releases before? It's because of this thing called "adding new features" which by the way don't come free of computing power on any OS.

"The War Room"

[mao che minh]

I bet a calm, eerie silence fell over the Microsoft developer's "War Room" when the news of this newest XP enhancement hit the fan. Even Balmer probably had nothing to say.

I would have paid to see their expressions.

Re:Here's a thought...

[sniser2]

Here's another thought...Wait until you (or someone trustworthy) has actual evidence of something like that, before spouting off?

But would having evidence not be illegal, reverse engineering and all that?

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[SonicBurst]

Not to be an ass or anything, but XP doesn't run on alphas. If you take a careful look at the patch file, you'll see ia64 in the file name. 2 completely different architectures.

phase I

[sstory]

Worried that Linux is gaining market share, this is just phase I in making XP seem more like Linux. In phase II, Microsoft will break the ability to effortlessly cut and paste across programs. In phase III, they make the process of installing programs opaque, introducing 'package managers'. Then, in the diabolical phase IV, they ditch plug-and-play, and move to a system whereby recompilation of the kernel is often necessary when changing harware. Everyone will think that's the worst until they reach phase V--in which you can't just use a disk after putting it in the drive, you have to perform actions to 'mount' the disk.

Re:phase I

[sstory]

I thought that was tired.

now it's fair

[Capt'n Hector]

yay! finally! my mac is faster!

Lemme guess

[Booyakka Joe]

Lemme guess!
This memory suckage occurs in programs NOT compiled with Microsoft "Approved" compilers.

<evil grin>
Perhaps a DR-DOSesq situation
</evil grin>

Guess which patch i'm gonna have to download tomorrow.

A common problem, unfortunately

[FwOOm]

Microsoft is doing this type of trickery a bit too often with their hotfixes. For many "nonessential" fixes, they won't publically release the fix in lieu of requiring calls to their tech support. Apparently they don't want to fully test for any ill effects of the hotfixes, so they try to release it to a small subset of people that are known to have the problem (I guess they are afraid of the liability of releasing to all). As far as i'm concerned, their hotfixes are installed "at your own risk" anyway. Googling the Q-number will almost always find you a mirror anyway ;-)

So - Using printf() supports terrorism

[SuperKendall]

I knew it!! Where else is that money going? I never see any...

I never did quite trust printf(), a little on the seedy side it always seemed to me. How can it just keep taking arguments? That's just not natural.

Re:So - Using printf() supports terrorism

[canajin56]

It only allocates the memory, it doesn't SPEND it :P

Re:So - Using printf() supports terrorism

[canajin56]

Oh crap, I mistyped the typo!...I think I'm going to go lie down for a bit :(

Re:So - Using printf() supports terrorism

[addaon]

Don't worry, I missed the typo too, and I made it. I hade to read through the comments five times before I figured out that I was an idiot. I think I'll write that discovery down on a postit note for future reference.

At last! The re-birth of tail-recursion!!

[SuperKendall]

For too long have tail-recursive supporters been laughed at and ignored while people used fancy stacks that grew without bounds!

No longer! Now, arise my tail-recursive brethren and let a new day of shallow-stack programming commence!!

Wait - stack growth is not the same as memory allocation? My bad. Back, I say, supporters of the One Recursion! The time is not yet right.

And I thought ...

[vandan]

... they'd unbundled IE from Windows and that was why it was taking so long to start...

Nah. I don't run Windows, and especially not XP. Gentoo only here.

Re:You call this "News"???

[Tuxinatorium]

well, it's the way things are.

VM issue?

[marcovje]

Seems more related to the VM (not postpone allocating/wiring mem till it is actualyl used) rather than real slow memory allocations.

Otherwise small blocks would have been affected, not large ones.

Since most machines nowadays are relatively stacked with memory, I'm not surprised if this was relatively rare

Re:VM issue?

[stratjakt]

It is very obscure.

If it was the major flaw the slashbots would want you to think it is, you wouldnt have heard about it first on slashdot. (Did you hear about Code Red, Nimda, Slammer, etc on slashdot first?)

As an aside, here's another nifty coding flaw I found recently:

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been -282 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment

I guess I posted from the future! (cue scary music)

Re:VM issue?

[marcovje]

>If it was the major flaw the slashbots would want you to think it is, you wouldnt have heard about it first on slashdot. (Did you hear about Code Red, Nimda, Slammer, etc on slashdot first?)

Bad comparison. Microsoft has to be public about security holes, but not about performance problems,
specially if they are startup related (iow not important for standard server usage)

640K is enough

[RalphBNumbers]

Well, Bill said 640K of memory is enough for most people, so I guess M$ it taking that as a design goal and ooptimizing their OS for things that don't need more RAM than that

Re:640K is enough

[boer]

"Bill said 640K of memory is enough for most people"

And he was absolutely right at the time, no?

Re:640K is enough

[ReadParse]

That's an urban legend.

Re:640K is enough

[hawkline]

That got modded up to a 5?

Re:640K is enough

[LMariachi]

Hm. Bill Gates denying that he said it doesn't necessarily make it an urban legend.

As a programmer

[SynKKnyS]

As a programmer, I have yet to run into this bug. I am using Windows XP SP1 with all patches from Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer applied. My game engine contains a few routines that rapidly allocate and deallocate memory for linked lists. There might be more than 400 allocation and deallocations every second from the time the engine starts. I have used GlobalAlloc (or the synonym LocalAlloc), HeapAlloc, VirtualAlloc, and CoTaskMemAlloc. Not one has proven to be slow at all, however, I settled on HeapAlloc since it seemed to be the most flexible. But, this may change if my plug-in system needs direct access to allocated memory (which only CoTaskMemAlloc provides). Does anyone know how to reproduce the bug in code?

Re:As a programmer

[NeuroManson]

It may be (a) Microsoft application specific, or (b) independant application specific, IMO. There are often hundreds of applications, be they shareware, freeware, or third party, that cause this issue, but lacking an exact basis for comparison between systems running each and every one of them, I doubt there is an easy answer, let alone a way to conveniently reproduce the bug.

Until more detail is offered as to the applications involved, there is no way to reproduce the bug, unless one develops psychic abilities, and can read the minds of every person using XP.

how is this offtopic?

[Stalcair]

it was a response to a very humorous post. Does that mean that we should not have "funny" since funny is obviously offtopic?

I wonder how often moderators actually read the guidelines...

xp /2k

[katalyst]

win2k... is a decent product despite the fact that it comes from microsoft and despite the fact that u need to install 2 service packs before you can trust your system. XP however is another headache all together. First, the concept of home and professional, is enough to drive any user user mad. Secondly, we've had this terrible experience with getting an XP professional system to work well with a Windows 2000 Server machine. Despite all service packs and "support", some problems just havent been resolved.
I also happen to have Mandrake 9 installed on my system, installed some of the Windows fonts, and what can I say... Dolphin rocks. :D

Jeez, learn to read

[fm6]

It's a cute joke, but...

This problem may occur if the programs you run frequently allocate and deallocate large blocks of memory. Changes in Windows XP SP1 in the memory management system have caused this operation to take significantly longer than with pre-SP1 Windows XP.

It's "frequently allocate and deallocate large blocks of" not just "allocate". This is not a small nit to pick, especially for Linux people. For years, GNU libc had a memory leak bug that was triggered by frequent allococation and deallocation of small blocks of memory. It only became an issue back in 2000, when Borland ported their component libraries to Linux.

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[jhylkema]

(This is rhetorical and not meant as a troll.)

Mein Gott!

The poster criticized a Microsoft competitor and didn't get modded into oblivion? The poster deigned to utter a discouraging word on /. about an open-source product and got away with it? What is this world COMING TO?!? C'mon, libc is perfect in every way and when a fully-functioning HURD kernel is released in 2060 or so, it's gunna be awesome!

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[Cloud 9]

The poster criticized a Microsoft competitor and didn't get modded into oblivion?

Yeah, but he didn't get modded up either.

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[curious.corn]

Perhaps he was trying to hint that M$ might have ripped-off old GNU libc code without even bothering to check the changelogs. ;-)

edo

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[MattCohn.com]

(Score:5, Interesting) ...he did now...

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[Ghost in the Machine]

"when a fully-functioning HURD kernel is released in 2060 or so, it's gunna be awesome!"

You really meant the year 0023, didn't you?

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[KewlPC]

A program that frequently allocates memory but doesn't deallocate it until much later is either broken, poorly written, or (most likely) both.

I think that this will hit programs that try to be at least somewhat memory efficient the hardest, because those programs will deallocate a block of memory as soon as they're done using it instead of waiting until much later to do it, leaving room for a potential slowdown.

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[fm6]

Who said anything about "much later"? The specific wording (how many times do I have to point out the specific wording) is "rapidly allocates and deallocates" (italics mine). A lot of object-oriented systems (like Borland's component libraries) do this, because they briefly instantiate small objects for all kinds of purposes.

Conspiracy theorists might think that this bug was invented solely to screw up Java programs, which also follow this model. But Java runtimes usually have their own memory manager, so they'd probably not be affected.

I guess MFC programs would also be immune. MFC pretends to be an object-oriented library, but that doesn't extend much past the syntax of the API. Perhaps that's why Microsoft didn't spot this earlier.

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[KewlPC]

Let's see, there are really only two alternatives:

1)The program allocates some memory, uses it, and then immediately deallocates it. Since the program might not need it for very long (possibly an object-oriented system like you mentioned), this would fall under the "rapidly allocates and deallocates" category.

OR

2)The program allocates some memory, and then waits until it exits (or some other, later time) to deallocate it.

As far as the first line in my post goes, I was trying to imply that any properly written program would be affected at least somewhat by this bug, since only bad programmers will rapidly allocate memory without also (potentially rapidly) deallocating it right after using it.

I think you need to reread my post. Nowhere did I say that programs that allocated a block and then didn't deallocate it until a good while later would be affected. Rather, I said just the opposite.

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[OwnerOfWhinyCat]

23 years after 2037... Obscure but funny. Thanks.

Re:Jeez, learn to read

[Apro im]

Yeah, but the question of frequency is unmentioned in your post - not all programs need to allocate memory over and over, right?

So inneficient programs aren't the only ones that aren't effected by this. There are programs which only need to allocate new memory every so often, or programs which aren't "done" with memory very quickly.

Chill out

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap... I love the fact that every post that's been modded to 4 or 5 seems to be written by someone who doesn't use Windows.

FYI: It's not a big deal. I've been using SP1 for months, and haven't noticed anything. Obviously, so have a whole lot of other people.

It's nothing to get so worked up about.

(Posted AC because this will be flamebait to some people).

Re:Chill out

[MattRog]

I've been using SP1 (since it was released) on several machines, both at home and at work, and have noticed nothing unusual. The machines have all been relatively speedy (1GHz and up) so perhaps a 1 second load time vs. a 10 second load time is not noticeable, but even on my home system in which I play games I have not noticed anything wonky. I would expect games and the like (for home-use systems) would be most affected since they tend to malloc lots of memory -- I'll just have to benchmark my load times on my apps now and then after I apply SP2 to see if I was hit or not.

If I ran any large DBMS software etc. maybe I'd notice it but for home/business use I'd wager the majority of Windows users weren't hit hard by it.

DHCP Problems persist as well

[citking]

SP1 for XP was supposed to address the DHCP problem that Microsoft has had with XP Home. Being a tech guy for a college, I can tell you that the DHCP issue was never corrected and people had to end up upgrading to XP Pro or upgrade to 2000 (yes, XP Home to 2000 is an upgrade, IMHO).

Re:DHCP Problems persist as well

[Professor Bluebird]

XP Home's almost down there with Windows Me in my opionion. It's not exactly designed to be networked. I was once a university network admin, and saw how bad it really is. So indeed XP Home to 2000 Pro is an "upgrade". It even corrects the problems with malloc.

Re:DHCP Problems persist as well

[DavidBrown]

Sorry, but could you please tell me what the DHCP problem is? Just so I know. I have an office network of about 13 XP machines with a server running NT2k. I have noticed that on occasion, the XP machines connection to the Internet stalls, but this is fixed by right-clicking on the network connection's icon and selecting "repair". Is this the problem, or is it something else that I ought to know about?

Re:DHCP Problems persist as well

[WoodstockJeff]

You are aware, of course, that uninstalling Norton Antivirus will break DHCP, and do so with difficult-to-track symptoms? For some reason, NAV makes a LOT of services dependent upon itself, and the uninstall can't be bothered with repairing all of them. DHCP is one of these neglected bits... Installing XPPro or Win2K would certainly fix the problem - the install would repair the registry. A Microsoft service pack probably WOULDN'T fix it, because it isn't a Microsoft issue!

Irritating!

[Gavin Rogers]

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

I forget how many times I have read that sentence when tracking down really strange problems with Microsoft apps and operating systems. They don't offer a patch most of the time, they'd might has well have written,

"Microsoft knows this is a problem with this product but you're just going to have to buy the next version and hope we fixed it, because we sure aren't fixing it now!"

Re:Here's a thought...

[drunk_as_in_beer]

L1nux is c00l,

Is that the only reason you run it? Because it's k3wll?!?

I have a dual-b00t set up myself,

Y0u are s0 K3W|_ d000d.

but- I cannot reliably run 99% of the Windows games and many other programs i've spent hundreds of dollars on under Linux.

"Waa, my pussy hurts"

Hence, I and many others like me can't just switch over to an all-Linux box, just because the Man at Microsoft might be slipping nasty stuff in that there's no evidence of.

Buy a damn second computer so that you can have a seperate Linux box. We all know you boot into Linux like once a month and only have it installed so you can act like you're elite and impress the Slashdot monkeys. Can't afford a seperate box? Oh yeah, you spent all your money on Windows games. You fucking sissy fairy-boy, quit playing games and wanking to gay porn watched in Windows Media Player, and get on the OSS bandwagon damnit.

Thank God for that!

[Goldberg's Pants]

All this time I thought it was just my imagination that the system was running slower! I figured I was just getting less patient in my old age.

Turns out it WASN'T all in my head. That's a relief...

So, Microsoft introduced something which really slows down the system. And all this time I thought it was called Office...

No problems..

[ball-lightning]

I haven't seen any slowdown personally...
I run:
Internet Explorer
Photoshop 6.0
Dreamweaver (yes, I am that lazy)
SimpleMu
Winamp
Windows Media Player
Office
Slowdown really bothers me too, so I'd expect if it was really noticable, I would have noticed. I suspect this may be more of a "benchmark thing" than anything else.

Way to patch those patches!

[IntelliTubbie]

Bill: "Oh yeah, you have an anti-patch patch? Well I have an anti-anti-patch patch!"

Cheers,
IT

Re:Times are a-changin'

[tuxedobob]

Uh, you're expecting to be modded up funny, right?

Nothing new.

[Futurepower(R)]

I support Windows XP for my customers, so I use it, too. I often have 20 instances of Mozilla open, each with several tabs. This works okay until I reach the limit of installed memory. Once the OS begins using virtual memory, the system becomes unstable.

Microsoft Windows operating systems have always been bad at managing memory. The first usable Windows OS was 3.0. It had terrible memory handling.

It's amazing that after all these years Microsoft has not learned how to handle memory allocations.

This is great news for Apple!

[callipygian-showsyst]

Now, maybe, Macinoshes will be as fast as Windows machines.

Wait

[sw155kn1f3]

That means apps will be loading 10ms instead
of 1ms on my brand new p4 with stripe raid ?

*going to shoot myself in the head*

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[Cloud 9]

Thank you, you beautiful bastard.

hehehe :)

[Mac Degger]

At first I had my suspisions (and a draconian EULA) to justify it, but now I know I was right to just patch away and not install SP1.

I wonder though if the EULA for SP2 is just as insane...I mean, with those terms, I'm forced to either not install it or run offline.

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[Hank Chinaski]

how do i know this is not a trojan or something?

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[mildness]

FWIW I scanned it with Norton.

thanks mattyohe

Trojans

[Jacco de Leeuw]

Good question.

Simply go to Properties and check the digital signature. It should be signed by Microsoft.

Re:Trojans

[rmohr02]

That said, how does one know it's not a trojan?

Re:Trojans

[Reziac]

Having had the same thought... the signatures look okay. Unpacked 'em with WinRar (being they're SFX Cabinet files) and nothing unkosher seen on a quick cruise thru the texts and executables.

(Why I bothered I don't know -- I'll probably never install SP1 on my lowly XP box anyway.)

But...

[Lolaine]

Doesn`t the whole OS slow programs? I mean, since whe are running an OS, we know it will slow down our apps. Is the counterpart to run only an app, no network, and so on, but Why cant be developed critical apps for the PC (or other cheap platforms) with no OS? (I mean, apps that boot themselves) It would make OS crashes less critical for that critical apps and make response speed (since no scheduler, context switches, etc...) increased. It would be a pain to work in one of those apps from scratch, but they would not rely in nothing but hardware. I remember playing a game for the PC (80286 era) that selfbooted from a 1.44 Mb Disk....

Re:But...

[dbazile]

What happens when I need to switch between PhotoshopOS and InternetExploderOS? Do I have to wait an extra 30 seconds for it to boot? Not to mention the fact that the clipboard would be useless.

IIRC, the reason (multitasking) OSes were created was so that people could switch between applications quickly as easily. Another reason is that programmers are too lazy to program a whole new OS for each and every new program.

Re:But...

[Lolaine]

Are Photoshop & Internet Explorer >CRITICAL (as in mission) apps? nope.

It really makes a difference

[forged]

I have Apache 2.0 and MySQL 4.0 configured as services. Then upon logon, Mozilla 1.3 loads itself in memory. I often had to wait up to one full minute after system boot and user logon, for the networking subsystem to get started !!! This meant no Internet access until one minute after logon - not acceptable. With the hotfix applied, boot is faster (as in pre-SP1) and there was a sizeable difference in programs load time.

EMM386

[Eudial]

They shoulda stucked to EMM386 - atleast it worked.

Like poeple say about trivial GNU/Linux problems..

[arose]

It's easy for you, but what about Joe "drag & drop" User?

Duh!

[telemonster]

This is how they propel the PC industry! People are supposed to buy faster desktops. You weren't supposed to notice.

Huzzah for retro-gamers!

[Hadlock]

This means me and my friend will be able to play Descent 1 without the originally gentle bobbing of the ship sped up to a nauseating earthquake speed! Dust off that copy of Descent and try it for yourself. I dare you to try and play for 15 minutes without getting a nauseating headache!

:-D

SP1 for Comment 5620948 Released

[Spunk]

Knowledge Base recommends:

Removing the extraneous word those.

Adding the letter a to complete the word meant.

Also, the user may instead replace the offending line with the following text:

Probably job security. They have to have people that patch the patches to the other patches that were meant to fix the O/S.

Re:Skip SP-1

[CausticWindow]

It includes the ability to uninstall 'Windows Components' like Outlook and Messenger. This is due to the antitrust judgement.

Oh, and it also breaks VPN horribly.

I wonder what's triggering the problem...

[Jugalator]

- SP1 on its own doesn't since I haven't got any problems.
- Large memory allocations doesn't since I'm using such programs quite often.

???

There must be something else involved too... I'm even quite sure *most* of us haven't got any ptoblems whatsoever, otherwise we'd heard about this long before it made the news recently.

Re:I wonder what's triggering the problem...

[SirDaShadow]

No, we got so used to the bloated code we didn't notice, or care about the slowdowns.

I applied the patch and I have noticed that not only it improves the loading performance, it also improves I/O. I made a program called MasterJoin (http://masterjoin.sourceforge.net not up yet but stay tuned!) that allows you to join usenet binaries split with mastersplitter (.001,.002,...)without using bat files or mastersplitter itself. Right now it's in early alpha and I haven't posted it yet until I feel confident there is no data loss, but so far it works. Before the XPhotfix I could join a 90MB file divided on 180 parts in ~1 minute. After the hotfix, 15 seconds!

Way to go Microsoft!

[Zocalo]

It really was just a matter of time, wasn't it? Microsoft has a serious performance issue with some systems, so obviously *everyone* running Windows XP-SP1 is going to want the patch, whether they are effected or not. So what do they do? They sit on the patch.

Result: What we have here; lists of links to "patches" cropping up everywhere, WaReZ sites, news sites, 3D and gaming sites, you name it. Now, how easy is it going to be for the kiddies to slip some trojans into the mix. Congratulations Microsoft; you quite likely just got a significant percentage of Windows XP systems rooted.

Here is the patch

[nberardi]

Here is the link to the patch that MS is talking about in their KB article. There is a german and english patch currently availiable.

http://www.windowplanet.net/community/forum/topic. asp?TOPIC_ID=3862

Anyone can make a mistake

[nurb432]

But.. A company with this much at stake and this many users should be above mistakes like this, which would have shown in testing..

I assume they test service packs before the are sent out.. :)

One word,

[pair-a-noyd]

Buwhaahahahahahahah!!!!!!!!!!!!

This patch makes a big diff on my system

[Raoul Snidjik]

Word XP especially loads faster.

What about linux....

[diegocgteleline.es]

Everybody complains about windows.....nobody remembers that linux vm was rewritten during a stable release. It sucked until some recent versions. People had to continue using 2.2; or developing their own trees...

In the meantime ....

[Atomic Anvil]

... folks with Macs are yawning and getting on with their lives. Macintosh: more than a computer, it's a way of life.

Solution to your problem

[wadetemp]

You work in a repair shop and you don't know how to get to Safe Mode?

I believe F8 gets you there if the menu's not shown. Switch to it and you'll boot fine without crashes. Then turn off the "instant reboot" on bluescreens (somewhere in My Computer->Properties maybe?) and give it a reboot into normal mode. This will let you see the bluescreen that's kicking your computer's ass every time it hits the desktop and the component involved (which you're probably going to find is a DLL from your video driver, or possibly your NIC driver.)

Re:Solution to your problem

[AsnFkr]

You work in a repair shop and you don't know how to get to Safe Mode?

You are kidding right? Of course I know how to get into safe mode. If you'd READ my post you would understand that the machine will not *allow* safe mode to be entered when this problem occurs. I hope this has restored your faith in the human race, as your comment has diminished mine. :)

Re:Solution to your problem

[wadetemp]

XP doesn't have a VGA mode... and in XP the normal behavior on an abnormal restart (like one caused by a bluescreen) *usually* results in XP's safe-mode menu showing up automatically without you having to do anything. You might have pointed that out rather than saying something vague. Your comment didn't indicate to me that you knew these things so I thought I'd offer a few hints to how I solved my issue. I suppose you just charged 2 hours more labor reinstalling the OS one more time?... :)

Re:Solution to your problem

[AsnFkr]

XP doesn't have a VGA mode

While I don't understand why you would decide to point this out now instead of during your first tour of ignorance, I'm terribly sorry...your dead wrong about XP not having a VGA mode. Take a look here.

I'm glad you intended to help me out in the situation that I was also helpfully pointing out to the rest of the community, but you have nothing intelligent to offer at this point so please pack your bags and march on gracefully. The fact of the matter is you are one out of the many thousands of people who read my comment that didn't get it. This means the problem is you, not me. If thirty people had made the same comment I would admit my post was too vague, but it was just you having problems understanding it. So in the future please don't try to be a smart ass slashdot elitist (ie. "You work in a repair shop and you don't know how to get to Safe Mode?") about things you only partially understand. Take care.

Re:Solution to your problem

[wadetemp]

So it does. I was thinking of NT VGA Mode, which is somewhat the equivalent of XP Safe Mode (of which this VGA Mode you pointed out seems to be now a subsetting?)

But if you really need help, could you please explain your problem? Did you press F8 repeatedly and it just didn't enter the safe mode menu? Did you see the menu, choose an option, and it booted into non-safe mode anyway? What did you do? "No safe mode" is about the equivalent of "XP doesn't have a VGA mode" if you'd like to compare apples to apples or inane comments to inane comments. ;-)

Re:Solution to your problem

[AsnFkr]

inane comments?

Sponsered Service Packs?

[GrBear]

This service pack has been brough to you by Intel -- Now with new, faster SP1 processors.. Upgrade today!

Re:Downloads/Patches Right Here -- i386/Alpha

[nbvb]

Yeah yeah, I gots me one of them thar Itanic workstations at work .... I bought it to run HP-UX, and well, it bites.

Ready for prime-time my ass.

I'll stick with my SunBlade & PA-RISC workstation, thanks ...

Now off to get a nice shiny AlphaStation :)

Re:Like poeple say about trivial GNU/Linux problem

[Assembler]

You have a good point.. most people have no idea that they even need to flash their bios.

However, 50% of the time, Joe User comes to me and I flash the bios for him.

btw, some OEMS have now have EXEs that can flash the bios while still in windows.

Slashdot on Google

[santos_douglas]

The thread was posted on Google News main page - how about that? Slashdot is now considered a legitimate news source.

Re:w2k is effected as well -- RH too?

[anagama]

A weird thing happened to me on Wednessday - OOo suddenly decided to take upwards of 5 minutes to load up - on my linux system. Very mysterious. I put a second hard-drive in and did a fresh install which solved that issue, but now my hostname keeps getting reset from its default to some name related to the network I connect to. This screws up my printer but I'm fine if I manually reset the hostname back to the original setting and restart printer deamon. I'm not even sure where to begin searching for help solving these issues. Any suggestions? If a computer I connect to has this new service pack, could that effect my linux system? Oh, and when I shut down, if I didn't manually change the hostname back, canna (for Japanese input) fails to close with a message that it is owned by another machine. I'm mystified!

Trying to read the article:

[Anonymous Coward]

And I get this:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers
error '80040e31'
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired
/cw/readstory.asp, line 303

Unintended Consequences

[core plexus]

My friend just bought a new Hp laptop and it had winxp on it. She kept getting out of memory messages, asked me for advise, and now she is a happy happy Linux user. Fortunately there is Sims for Linux now, so she is even happier. Sux that she had to pay the M$ tax, but it has a way of evening itself out.

Thank you M$

Man Gets 70mpg in Homemade Car-Made from a Mainframe Computer

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[Anonymous DWord]

Well, I called, and when they wanted to know where to send it, I gave them my @fuckmicrosoft.com address. She kind of muttered something, and I still haven't gotten any mail from them. How long does this usually take?

M$ New Slogan

[Geeyzus]

Where do you want to go eventually?

Yes

[Shilaeli]

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

no big deal

[ethelred]

Considering the relatively large amount of people running a pirated version of WinXP, and haven't installed service pack 1, i'd say the problem is rather contained.

Re:no kidding

[error0x100]

I'm also wondering about this. Visual Studio 6 on Windows XP with VS6 Service Pack 5 has a blatant flaw in which your .cpp source files are sometimes deleted from the hard disk (I kid you not). I've been using VS6 for years, and this bug is a relatively recent development. And SP5, it seems, is going to be the last service pack for VS6. So for customers who want this rather serious problem fixed, their only option is basically to 'upgrade' to .NET. And you can bet that thousands of customers will do precisely that. I have this theory, which I could never prove, that MS deliberately introduced this bug in order to give thousands of their customers an "incentive" to upgrade. Many customers wouldn't need or want to upgrade if they weren't forced to, because the current version is already good enough for them. Its the age old problem of companies like Microsoft ending up competing with older versions of their own products.

They're a damn drain on the economy, if you ask me. They raise the costs of doing business for so many companies who use their products, with little or no real benefits from all the 'upgrades'. Money that could be better spent on something productive (or saved and the product made cheaper) is piling up in MSs bank account instead.

For all you naysayers out there....

[John Courtland]

I've just installed the hotfix and it has made quite a difference on my 433MHz w/ 256MB RAM laptop. Trillian and my wireless network monitor both start up noticably faster, and Opera starts faster as well. I would say I notice a speedup of a few seconds for the network and maybe 1-2 seconds for Trillian, maybe 4 for Opera.

Re:For all you naysayers out there....

[billeger]

John, Thank you for the reassurance that it is possible to find the hotfix! I spent more than an hour bumbling around in the various links provided in the slashdot note and following in MS's grotto. For the life of me I can't figure out how to find the download button. I'm running a legit XPP SP-1 and noted serious problems with Corel and some functions on Netscape after installing SP-1. I think there is a worse problem than speed as I also lost a fairly simple Corel Draw file for no reason I can comprehend -- printed it out, saved it. But it would never open again. That's a possible sign of one of those little memory buckets losing it! Mahalo from the middle of the Pacific Ocean!

bugs

[fitten]

Well... first, this is very old news. I read in on other sites over a week ago.

Second, (I'm not saying anything of the case here, but) two of the most notorious bugs I have ever tracked down in software were flaws in algorithms which resulted in incorrect results. In each case, the algorithms made assumptions that were simply incorrect, and terminated the algorithm early or "optimized out" cases that should not have been. In both cases, fixing the bug did result in a slowdown. So, the choice was to take a performance hit and have code that actually worked, or leave the faster, buggy code in place.

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[JTunny]

Thanks for hosting that. I've just installed it, had a quick test and theres a definite improvement. I can now alt-tab between C&C Generals and the desktop a hell of a lot faster, game also closes more efficiently. Netscape browser and mail load noticably faster too.

malloc/free broken under NT...Memory Management???

[lent]

malloc() and free(), the first two dynamic memory management functions that most C programmers learn, were broken back in Windows NT.


If you ever had an application ported from UNIX to NT that wasn't a memory hog under UNIX but slowly ate its way through virtual memory on NT, this is most likely why.

Microsoft sneakily added the _heapmin() function to combine contiugous small free'd blocks into big chunks of memory.
Unfortunately, free(), malloc()'s happy buddy, had been combining free blocks on each call to free() since the dawn of the C programming language.
My guess is Microsoft got better performance on benchmarks by essentially not freeing memory!
If you look at K&R "The C Programming Language", Kernighan & Ritchie implement malloc and free

free() itself is the last thing. It scans the free list, starting at freep, looking for the place to insert the free block. This is either between two existing blocks or at the end of the list. In any case, if the block being freed is adjacent to either neighbor, the adjacent blocks are combined. The only troubles are keeping the pointers pointing to the right things and the sizes correct.

Hey but don't take my word for it. Intel has warned you about this for a while, [p.61 of 101].

NOTE for MSVC users: As in any C application, the standard C calls malloc() and free() may be used to manage memory. If you are using the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler, it is VERY IMPORTANT to note a scarcely documented fact of the Win32 API, in that free() does not actually free the memory that is being accessed (as it does in most standard C compilers). MSVC will free the pointer to the memory but will not actually release the physical memory. To release the physical memory a call to the Windows extension function _heapmin() must be made. This function should be documented in Win32 API documentation but it may be noted that it is difficult to find a reference to it otherwise. If the application uses free() and malloc() but not _heapmin() then virtual memory issues will arise during extended use of the application.

But Mircosoft "fixed" it in MSVC 4.0 and up.

Note [New feature hides ugly bug]In Visual C++ Version 4.0, the underlying heap structure was moved to the C run-time libraries to support the new debugging features. As a result, the only Win32 platform that is supported by _heapmin is Windows NT. The function returns -1 and sets errno to ENOSYS, when it is called by any other Win32 platform. [But what happens if you run an old VC < 4.0 compiled binary? Probably the old function gets called]

In a related move, Microsoft has quietly added to the Windows SDK that the color red, formerly 622 - 760nm, shall be redefined with the values 455 - 492nm (formerly known as blue). Programs from other platforms should add a call to the _PutOnRoseColoredGlasses() function to avoid compatibility problems. :-)

Re:At Microsoft, quality is definitely job 1.

[Lazyhound]

Holy shit, you're a pretentious ass! Way to go!

Re:malloc/free broken under NT...Memory Management

[0x0d0a]

I strongly suspect that the C standard provides no guarantees about whether free() coallesces free chunks or not, regardless of whether some implementations do so.

Re:Here's a thought...

[drunk_as_in_beer]

You are learning, my young coward. Soon you will learn the true power of beer. For is beer free? Or is it beer that gives us speech? Though you must rise from the cowardry and come full force into public intoxication.

OT: Humor

[IndependentVik]

Great post. Honestly, who gets off telling people that the things they laugh at aren't really funny?

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[bniederee]

Fix seems to slowdown start times. Might be a good idea to run bootvis after installing.

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[Lord Flipper]

Sorry to br redundant, but i'd rather that, than to fail to express my gratitrude. thank you.

Allocate large chunks of memory

[Incy]

Sounds like Microsoft is trying to slow down the startup of Java programs!

effect/affect

[markbanang]

"w2k is effected as well"

Something cannot be effected. Something can be affected, but to affect something you effect a change.

XP Service Pack Slows Programs!

[menahem]

Thank God for linux!

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[raxial]

thanks for hosting the fix

<sarcasm>
I just love chatting with MS phone peeps.
</sarcasm>

SERIOUS memory management problems in WinXP SP1

[Futurepower(R)]

I've encountered SERIOUS memory management problems in WinXP SP1. I think the problem is much worse than Microsoft knows.

No?

[lee7guy]

It can't be so? Can it?

Re:THE FIX DOES NOT COST ANYTHING -- DOWNLOAD LINK

[PBCODER]

Only Commonly known trojans will be found by a virus scanner..

One can easily write a new trojan and it would not be flagged by a virus scanner. Something as simple as an application to track key strokes looking for the administrator password and then send it coded to a newsgroup can be written in as little as 30k..

Conspiracy Theory of the Day

[core_dump_0]

Microsoft is not releasing this widely until SP2 because they want to use it to get you to download SP2. Along with SP2 comes a brand new licensing agreement that nobody knows about yet.

it has a build in list.

[leuk_he]

It pretends it is calculating, but in reality it is listing keys that is has on an internal list.

Installation Help

[dagaey2]

Can anyone help out a newbie? I downloaded the patch but have no idea what to do next - double clicking on it extracted two files: Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe and Q815411_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU_Symbols.exe. The first seems to do the installation but I have no idea what to do with the second - it asks for a directory and then creates a folder called symbols in that directory and a file called ntdll.pdb in it. I'm not sure what directory I should give and what to do with the file. Thanks