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Windows XP SP2 Still Rough Around the Edges
Megor1 writes "According to crn.com when they tried upgrading various computers to Windows XP SP2 RC2 3 out of 5 of the machines failed to come back up, and had to have both SP1 and SP2 removed via various hacks supplied by Microsoft. Sounds like it might take a lot longer for Microsoft to release SP2 if RC2 is any sign of how far they are along."
Jeezus Kreist, XP's SP2 ?!? I've still never been able to install W2K's SP4 and have a bootable machine afterward. Good thing SP4 has an uninstaller.
A OS patch with an uninstaller. They've been aware that their shit sucks for years.
I installed SP2 on a vmware virtual machine. No problems with that yet.
Come on, I'm not crazy.
I find it Ironic that on Slashdot that it is considered good news that Microsoft has problems fixing security on peoples system. You would think that a technical community would want all the products to run smoothly. Because with MS having no security fixes then your network traffic is full of Microsoft Crap. See this is bad news because the general community will still have all sort of security problems with there PC costing them a lot of money. It is like a Pepsi Fan being happy that a major Coca-Cola plant blew up killing hundreds of workers. I hear a lot of Slashdotters go I just use the right tool for the right job, then when they hear that MS screwed up again then they are going hooray. I would think that they will be disappointed for having a lack of stable tools.
No I am a long timer on Slashdot, but I just wanted to point out the Irony.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
This is an exaggeration. Nobody here loves Microsoft's business practices, certainly not me, but Windows 2000 Professional is an excellent desktop OS, and the 2000 Server products are good too.
I've been running 2000 Pro since it was available, and I've put off installing XP even though I have a boxed copy of it simply because I don't see any possible benefit of switching from what's a fantastic stable yet flexible desktop OS.
Frankly, people who knee-jerk and say "it's from Microsoft, it must be shit" or words to that effect have no idea of how good a product Windows 2000 really is.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Slashdot and the user's experience.
n00b: "Windows sucks I use Linux!!"
seasoned: "//Begin "Windows sucks I use Linux" posts..."
false veteran: "tell something we don't know!" (this post)
veteran: useful posts
damn old: gets tired of the game and now just lurks (but shows up in the eventual "Low UID" thread)
I've been running 2000 Pro since it was available, and I've put off installing XP even though I have a boxed copy of it simply because I don't see any possible benefit of switching from what's a fantastic stable yet flexible desktop OS.
Games. That was the reason I upgraded from 2000 to XP. Games that were only for Win98 and balked when running in 2000 ran trouble free in XP.
Other than that, 2000 is great. I used it at the office until they gave me a new notebook with XP preinstalled.
No sig
No, it's RC aka Release Candidate - that means this is a candidate that is intended to be representative of the final release, and it's being put out there for public testing of the candidate before it's polished into the final. Or that's the idea anyway. An alpha or beta could be forgiven a 60% failure rate, an RC should never be like this.
I'm sure Windows XP SP2 is going to fix every known security problem, block pop-ups and make your cows give 10% more milk. But what about us non-XP customers? To this day at my company we're putting Windows 2000 on all new computers, and we're not about to change to XP anyime soon, looks more like never in fact (except for new laptops where it makes sense).
Last time I checked W2K was still on the list of fully supported operating systems for at several years. In fact, I've got black on white that we're promised security fixes at least up till 2007. Up until now W2K and XP have recieved new patches in sync, is this about to change? As they say, Microsofts worst competitor is their own older products, maybe this is a new way of "encouraging" upgrading.
It's like deja vu all over again.
Ya but as soon as everyone moves to a browser with pop-up blocking, advertisers will move to something even more annoying and pop-up blocking will no longer be feature, just an unofficial standard.
o ck
Hopefully Flash will take over since this extension already exists and works quite well:
http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#flashbl
Microsoft (and many other companies) need users to do a lot of beta testing for these types of upgrades. There's just too many unknowns out in the wild.
Many people (companies) adopt a wait-and-see approach to big service packs and patches.
The people most likely to try out the SPs are those who don't really care if Windows still boots after the procedure. That is to say, those who don't use Windows as their primary OS.
So, in the end, it's the linux users who will beta test and get SP2 out the door.
(p.s -- typing this drivel was vetter than working the last 5 minutes of a Friday).
I ran 2k on my desktop at home and my laptop. I upgraded the laptop to XP for the wireless utilities built in. 2k required a vendor supplied utility which plain sucked. XP SP2rc2 has a very nice setup for wireless that makes it worthwhile for me. Over 4 years of running 2k and XP I've had only 3 bluescreens. Two of them were hardware faults (no ECC mem on either of my win machines). So, altogether not bad. I have my complaints, but stability is generally not one of them.
My servers are a different story. They are all Solaris Sparc boxes. When it comes to my web/dns/firewall/mail I don't trust anything else yet. I often load up a machine with the newest SUSE, redhat or Mandrake and play around, but always end up leaving things the way they are - working.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Hey, wait a minute!
Claiming that stability with an OS is something to brag about is stupid! That should be an inherrent task of an OS. You don't go around selling cars saying that it starts every time you try, and never randomly turns off while you are driving it (nor that the windows turn blue)! The ONLY reason why you say Windows 2000 is stable is b/c it's predecessores weren't, so it looks like a big thing.
Any windows operating system has the HUGE security issue. The only reason why we have more problems today then before is that Windows 95 and ME crashed before they could get infected (together with the fact of less broandband and internet in general). And once MS has fixed thier mistakes, they will turn around, and market that as a feat of their technology. That's like selling a car with a lock!
Now to a point where I agree with you: I've been running Windows 2000 since the day it was released as well, and I have regreted every day of it. However, it still wasn't enough to make me switch permanently to Linux. But that's due to my extreme lazyness.
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Yep, the office PCs here are Win2K too. Everything "just works" 95% of the time. But you manage them. The machines I dealt to yesterday were looked after by one peoeple who didn't "manage" them, just used them. What I'm saying is that Windows machines - without help from professionals - aren't as user-proof as they are made out to be.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
You know what? The only people I ever see complaining about Clippy are Slashdotters who think it's still 1998, and that BSODs and Clippy are regular parts of the Windows experience.
I haven't seen Clippy in a default Office install in five years. Whenever he did appear, I--gasp--right-clicked on him and clicked "Hide," thereby causing him to never return.
Why do people still use criticisms from the past decade to criticize Microsoft now? I mean, really, what does Clippy have to do with SP2 RC2 causing some problems on some computers? For the record, I run SP2 RC2 on both my home machine and my laptop with no problems at all. In fact, bootup is shorter and performance overall is snappier, presumably because of all the recompiled system libraries (using the VS2005 compiler...SP1 was compiled with VS6).
But thankfully you backed that up somehow.... right?.... or .. maybe... not.
Let me know when you write an operating system which runs on everything Windows does, and handles upgrades better. In fact, let me know when ANYONE writes an operating system that does a better job with crazier hardware. Microsoft has a lot of problems, but they hire good engineers. It's a complex problem.
Have you ever developed software? Do you know anything about deploying software? Do you know how difficult it is to upgrade software on millions of machines that have had near-infinite permutations of software written by either malicious or ignorant third-party developers installed and uninstalled?
There's a lot Microsoft could do better. But I really can't stand you implying that they're a bunch of idiots when it's painfully obvious it's the other way around.
I think I am going to wait a few weeks before putting SP2 on my XP machines. Let somebody else be the guinea pig, and I will wait for the fixes. Until then, I will just avoid IE, don't click on attachments, and trust in my (Linux) firewall to keep everything else out.
My rights don't need management.
"But then again this is Slashdot, where no good bashing of Microsoft goes unheralded."
Kettle meet pot. Before you go bashing Slashdot for an article it didn't write you might want to consider that its actually possible that what they said did indeed happen.
If your really the "I.T. Director for a large organization" then you'd know that CRN is a completely middle of the road channel rag that's more prone to publishing the MS line and reporting on their products then bashing them. What can I say? The machines they tested SP2 on didn't like it. Shit happens. They way your reacted is as if this piece came from www.anythingbutM$.com. Also going back to the whole your an IT director thing, if that was the case then you'd also realise that MS Service Packs can and do break standard configs for companies all of the world with every release. Many a company has been bit by the MS upgrade bug where the machine just never came up after an MS software patch was supplied. This is exactly what happened to them. Why the shock and outrage?
My guess is eventually they will find out what the problem was and then 5 out of 5 installs will go fine. That doesn't mean they shouldn't report on what they find.
"IT guy" Top 3 VAR
It's not that I disagree completely with your statement about slashdot being biased against microsoft, and I definately agree with your assesment of the article, but....
It seems that in the past year or two I've heard people whining about all the anti-MS FUD that happens on slashdot. Whenever someone (like yourself) has a good rebuttal to the parent story, it gets modded up for everyone to see, and everyone sees their complaint.
Now, I _might_ be wrong on this, but the fact that posts like yours -- that are exposing the truth behind articles like these -- are being seen more and more lately in the higher thresholds, is evidence to me that the community is willing to hear your "pro-MS" rebuttal, and therefore is not quite as closed minded as the generalization makes it out to be.
[Insert obligatory.. "This is Pro-MS, therefore no one will like me and i'll be modded as flamebait" comment here =P]
arcane for life
The ActiveX stuff they've already downloaded would still execute, its getting new ones that will be an issue. I mean, whatever MS does there will be issues and they have to do something. Might as well do it piecemeal.
It blows my mind people are being told to wipe down their computers and reinstall everything just because of spyware. Blows my mind people might be losing stuff like baby pictures or other irreplacable data. Perhaps all this IE nonsense is teaching people how to backup properly.
what a great point. just underlines how much of a devide there really still is between makers and users. Now you mention it, i wonder what the h*ll those hotfixes (some of which begin "Windows XP hotfix" and others that don't) are doing in amoungst all the users' apps? surely OS components should have their own list or be hidden by a checkbox or something to mark them out as being different, important and basically not be there when a user is looking to make some more hard disk space or whatever..
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
the biggest problem is that thay fail allready at step 1
What is your criteria for failure? Most of company's products control majority of market share and leader is richest man in world?
What is success?
Nothing new from this cube, just wondering why Microsoft is once again biting off more than it can chew with trying to tackle so many upgrades and patches with XP SP2.
It seems unnecessary to have to make one gargantuan service pack, instead of releasing smaller service packs semi-annually, some being small, some being large depending on the demands/vulnerabilities discovered during the 6 month cycle.
They could also focus on enterprise service packs and desktop service packs separately.
Ther just doesn't seem to be any middle ground; there's linux distros and their apps which weekly release patches/upgrades, and then there's Microbloat at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Like I said, nothing new from this cube that hasn't been laid out here before, just seems like common sense isn't being applied at Redmond, and it doesn't make sense, because common sense is open source, free!