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."

Comments

Microsoft magic numbers

[PIPBoy3000]

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.

Re:Microsoft magic numbers

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

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...

Re:Microsoft magic numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Just SP2 is Rough?

[MoonBuggy]

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.

Uninstalling critical updates can also be easy

[jesterzog]

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.

Re:Sigh

[Jungle guy]

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.