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Windows XP SP2 Still Rough Around the Edges

Posted by michael on from the cheese-grater dept.

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."

18 of 613 comments (clear)

  1. Just SP2 is Rough? by SeinJunkie · · Score: 1, Interesting

    At what point are we saying anything Microsoft makes is more refined than "rough?"

    1. Re:Just SP2 is Rough? by MoonBuggy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I must concur - I've used many different operating systems and flavours thereof and the best I'd always felt towards them was either tolerance or a sense of achievement.

      I hated Win98, it was buggy, crash prone and really not all that easy to use. 2K's stability was a breath of fresh air but it still took a fair bit of messing around to make hardware play nicely or install 'obscure program X'. XP was better with support for hardware and software as well as being pretty stable although nothing to get excited about (uptime measured in days before memory hogging caused a reboot) but the annoying 'helpers' and a habit of hiding what was under the hood meant the initially shallow learning curve hit a brick wall - when the system ran I tolerated it as something to run my programs, when it didn't run it was fixable although frustrating.

      Of the various Linux distros I tried Mandrake was my favourite, but software installation had a habit of breaking things for unknown reasons and although the command line gave me a nice fine grained control over fixing these issues, relief was all I felt after spending hours hunting down that stray symbol breaking the entire shell script. The GUI tools for administration all worked but I often found myself turning back to CLI for more control which would then confuse the options in the GUI panels. Once the machine was working it was very fast and very stable, but I always dreaded the next problem and thinking of how long it might take to fix, and lets face it, Linux isn't known for it's looks - the GUI was inconsistent at best and unusable at worst.

      Recently I purchased a Mac - Panther is extremely quick, software installs perfectly every time simply by dragging and dropping, the configuration GUIs are perfectly and logically laid out, the CLI is still fully featured and perfectly integrated and above all that it's blazingly fast, solid as a rock and amazing looking. Even the third party software seems more polished than Windows nagware or functional but half-finished Linux projects.

      Each OS has it's place, but for day-to-day desktop use I know what I'll be using for the forseeable future.

  2. Microsoft magic numbers by PIPBoy3000 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Joking aside, there's some truth behind Microsoft and their versions. One of the developer's had a blog that talked about it in detail.

    Essentially, version 1.0 is a best guess at what the customer wants. Version 2.0 is started even before the customer sees the 1.0 version. Finally, customer feedback is incorporated into the 3.0 version and things might actually start getting useful.

    1. Re:Microsoft magic numbers by xanadu-xtroot.com · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ya, know, I never got this. People complain about Clippy (yes, I hated the idea too, but not the point), but no one complains about that star thing in OpenOffice...

      --
      I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
      I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
    2. Re:Microsoft magic numbers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Except that a lot of people actually do use Clippy, at least in my experience.

      When I first started working at my current job, we were loading the Office assistant as part of the default Office installation. When we got new computers and I had to create a new Ghost image for them, I took the Office assistant out of the default install since, of course, "nobody uses it". We received so many calls from users who, upon using their new systems for the first time, could not figure out how to get the dog/globe/little man to appear when they were typing documents. We got more of these calls than for any real problems associated the change.

      I would say that Microsoft knows its customers better than you do.

    3. Re:Microsoft magic numbers by malfunct · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Clippy was written to save microsoft money on its tech support costs. It worked amazingly. It would have been a far better product if they had the time and money to fully implement it instead of only the beginner API. The full design included an intermediate and advanced level that would have annoyed the normal /. users far less than the beginner only version we got ot see. As it is clippy is an astounding success, most /. readers just happen to be out of the target audience which is why clippy could be turned off.

      --

      "You can now flame me, I am full of love,"

  3. Re:frosty by RTPMatt · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My computer has been acting up ever since i put it on. It freezes during regular usage, and while shutting down. It never did that before (by never i mean not as much ;) ) Its all bad.

  4. Good... by pmsyyz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Good, the longer it takes for SP2 (with its popup blocker for IE) to come out, the more time alternate web browsers (Firefox) have to gain marketshare. Popup blocking is one of the biggest selling points.

    --
    Phillip
  5. Odd it had the reverce effect for me by Cyberglich · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My pc was't working (ie and firefox crashed 3 sec affter asssesing a page. out of town and in troubble i booted to my linux partition downloaded SP2 beta and installed it and it fixed it...

  6. Re:I hope it sucks horribly by PepsiProgrammer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, I understand that it would suck, I depsise windows worms as much as the next guy (They clog up our logs, networks and phone lines). But I think that if directly after SP2 another code red esque worm hit big it would be a very lage wake-up call for the general public. Yes it would be a pain in the ass in the short term though Im not advocating the creation of such a worm, or trying to create one myself. Im just saying I wouldent shed any tears. Alternatively I would love for microsoft to actually patch XP to be a decent product worth the money they charge for it. Because that would solve half of my beefs with them. I just dont think thats gonna be possible with just a service pack. And with longhorn moving the way of DRM I dont think any windows based system will ever become a decent product. I know im gonna lose some karma on this post and the last one, but this is just how I feel, it may be wrong and slightly OT. Mod me down if you must.

    --
    "The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
  7. Microsoft should do this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Microsoft should just stop all activity on the products, scrap the Windows platform and start from scratch. Yeah it may hurt in the short run however it will benefit them in the long run (as well as open source). It will be less expensive for microsoft to do so, and they shouldnt give a damn about previous compatability, they should admit their faults start over and make an operating system right.

    Granted it will show how weak closed source development models are as compared to open source development models because for atleast the operating system the developers overall made the system right the first time.

    Score 0 because slashdot has anonymouscowardaphobia.

  8. Re:Installed fine for me by value_added · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Microsoft finally wisened up and started turning features ... They've made a lot of steps forward in terms of security.

    Could someone elaborate on how making these much heralded "settings changes" can be characterized as "a lot of steps forward." I know an argument can be made with respect to the mitigating widespread problems on the internet, but it seems to me that if I habitually leave my car door unlocked (doncha just love car analogies) and my car is regularly vandalised, how does changing my habits and locking my car imply that my car is secure, or suggest anything other than simply that I'm less of an idiot than I once was.

    The folks at Mercedes would readily tell me my car's security mechanisms are inadequate. My girlfriend, I'm sure, would vouch that I'm just as much an idiot as before, but she doesn't notice it as much.

  9. Uninstalling critical updates can also be easy by jesterzog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Very interesting how (relatively) easy it is to uninstall all service packs from Win XP:

    I was recently helping a friend to clean out her XP Home computer. Since she'd bought it no patches of any sort had been applied, and it was at the horrendous state where if she left it alone for a few hours, she'd come back to see a desktop popping full of porn advertisements.

    I downloaded all of the available critical updates from Windows Update and showed her how to run AdAware, which on its own detected and removed something near a thousand suspicious objects. We then took a look around places like the add/remove software section.

    At this point she got quite a shock because about half the listed programs were something called "HotFix". After everything that'd been frustrating her in the past months, she wanted to remove them all immediately. When you've spent the last hour removing porno popup and spyware programs from your computer, something called a "hotfix" does not look like it's supposed to be there. It took a lot of effort to convince her that a Hotfix is actually a Microsoft patch.

    It hadn't occurred to me until then that it's not a particularly intelligent name for what's supposed to be a security patch. Now I start to wonder how many other people out there go ahead and remove the hot fixes because they don't realise that they're not spyware. It'd be very much in Microsoft's interests to consider renaming their critical updates.

  10. Re:Sigh by Jungle+guy · · Score: 4, Interesting
    No, Clippy still exists and he haunts me.

    Let me explain. I work in a big corporation, with thousans of computers, and on every single one Windows and MS office are installed. If, for some reason, I go to a different computer, log on with my username and password, and launch MS Office, the "hide assistant" setting is not there, and Clippy shows in all his glory. It has happened twice this week, for example.

    So please stop astroturfing Microsoft. They deserve every complain about Clippy.

  11. No problems here. by Maul · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm running SP2 RC2 on my machine here and it is going suprisingly well. I've only had problems with one application (which I was able to resolve by uninstalling and reinstalling it).

    --

    "You spoony bard!" -Tellah

  12. Re:Amazing by brsmith4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Thats wonderful. I've about 70 win machines on a condor grid, some AMD boxes some P4 Dells. On 3 machines, SP4 completely hosed Add/Remove Programs and the control panel. There was something else even more serious but this was a while ago. I had to roll everything back to SP3 to maintain concurrency.

    I'm a beowulf admin and deal mainly with linux so I am probably not the best choice when you want someone to admin a windows box. Maybe I screwed up somewhere?

    Default Win2k install, nothing installed, sp4 update. 3 screwed machines. Ever heard of this?

  13. Re:The new firewall is a joke by BenjyD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But couldn't someone with write access to the registry do much nastier things than turn off the firewall? That would require (I imagine) administrator privileges, and if untrusted code is running as an admin, you're screwed anyway.

  14. question of handling large files by gordo3000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I usually manage and around several hundred large files(all in excess of 300 megs) and almost always, when accessing where they are or moving them from one harddrive to the next I finish my work fine but then for some reason, explorer continues to use 99% of my processor(2.4 p4). At first, I had no idea what it was doing so I let it run for a few hours and nothing happned so I crashed explorer and started it again, problem fixed but about as annoying as anything. Have you ever tried to bring up the task manager and do something when you processor is devoted to a program doing nothing!

    I was wondering if anyone had/has this problem and if anything in SP2 adresses it. At least half the time I open a folder with large files or play a file(these are mostly movies), and every time I try to copy something this happens. It actually happens so much I always as a precaution regulate explorer to the lowest priority setting so in case I need to save info before ending explorer and brining it back up I can save data in important applications that are running. I think its ridiculous that i have to put up with this and I find it disgusting that when linux can handle those big, scary files, windows barfs on them every time.

    Now that I am calm again, any help or recommendations would be appreciated and if SP2 actually adresses this. I wrote a pissy letter to MS about it when it happened and then realized, they don't actually care. I got my comptuer with windows on it, it was a laptop or else that would have never happened and I think they know that when they get a pissy, technically competent letter.