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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."
Neat! This is the best thing to happen to the internet in years.
...you'll wait for XP SP3.1.
Windows XP SP2... codename Longhorn =)
Actually the computers not turning back on is one of the new security features....
That's 40% and pretty decent for M$.
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.
Installed a beta of SP2 maybe 2-3 months ago. Worked like a charm, and the new firewall is nice.
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.
... Because it didn't turn on at all :)
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
Yeah, I must be clicking INSTALL too hard. ;)
I don't see how they could know it was the service pack that caused the machine to fail. I just did a random test here in my office. I shut down everyone's computer, and 3 out of 5 failed to come back up again. This is normal operation, not something new introduced by the service pack.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I've got FreeBSD and Windows XP SP 2 running side-by-side. I installed various incarnations of SP 2, from the original technical preview, to the current release candidate. I just installed the newest private build from Microsoft yesterday. When I was using the technical preview, a lot of software - especially CD and DVD burning software - was completely borked. Now things seem to be working better.
The improvements to Internet Explorer are really the main thing that caught my attention. Microsoft finally wisened up and started turning features like ActiveX off by default, and now has permissions completely locked down for the local computer. All I can say is, THANK GOD.
I normally have a lot of criticism for Microsoft, but this service pack is one of the few Windows builds I have to compliment them on. They've made a lot of steps forward in terms of security. However, as long as they rely on a complex, feature-filled package by default, we're going to see security holes in the default installations of Windows.
The real test is going to be when we roll this out hardcore at the office. Since the company has a lot of DCOM applications, I suspect many of them will break. This isn't really anything new to Linux and Unix users; when you install new libraries, you often have to recompile binaries for compatibility. However, in Windows enterprises, this is going to amount to absolute chaos - especially given that most businesses don't have access to source code to recompile.
This service pack is a good baby step in a long journey. In the meantime, I'm going to be busy dealing with broken applications.
You can download RC3 here. The upgrade time is even shorter than SP2 if you do a "take over disk" method!
Besides, Microsoft's profits are up. Why should they care about the give-away freebies, if they can make more people buy stuff from them anyway?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
First off, I'll go ahead and acknowledge that this is a release candidate. However, the type of surgery that people had to do in order to recover from that BSOD is way more than what Joe Sixpack will be capable of.
Reading the details of their methods, the rollback took out hardware drivers. Though they were able to recover all but one after a reboot, it probably would have been easier to just re-image the drive instead of having to jump hoops with rollback, registry edits, etc.
Wonder if this is Windows trying to make itself more secure...in a Darwinian fashion. If this is the case, I'm not so sure I'm too much opposed to it.
I installed SP2 on a vmware virtual machine. No problems with that yet.
Come on, I'm not crazy.
The service pack is leaving your computer's no-execute bit set, preventing your computer from executing. To unset your computer's no-execute bit, bang your head repeatedly against your computer while saying: "Never install an MS service pack until about 6 months after its release and always have a full backup."
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
>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 this puppy's ready to go gold.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Valuable is the man who shits ram . . .
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
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
Micrsoft sees the worm attacks taking down systems and decided to do something about it, and thus XP SP2 was born.
Worms took down 60% of the systems they got installed on, and now too, so does XP SP2.
Protect yourself from the next round of worms due out in a few weeks, and install XP SP2 to take down your system before a Worm does. If your system is offline, it cannot be infected by a worm, you are protected 100%!
Microsoft also competes with spyware/adware companies by making XP SP2 hard to uninstall as well without some clever hacks, or the uninstall program from the creator of the software.
"We're just looking out for your best interests." an anonymous Microsoft employee is quoted as saying.
"Warning, slippery when sarcastic!"
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Yeah, SP4 has an uninstaller. It's called Fedora Core 2 Disk 1.
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
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.
I upgraded 150 Dells to SP4 from SP2 and SP3, every single one came up perfectly. I suspect parent is a troll
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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...
I have more than 1 machine, bud, and the basic W2K install media, and lotsa hard drives lying around, so I can eventually get the failed SP4 outta there. If not, I can do a fresh install on a different drive.
I conceed that the thread-head could be considered misleading by some, but I intended no deceit, and the overall meaning is unchanged. HAND.
Service Pack 4 Permits You to Remove the Service Pack by Using the Recovery Console
Win2k has an excelent compatibility mode you can run games in. I've gotten many of the windows 98 games that many people have had issues running in win2k, to work with the compatibility mode. It's just kinda tricky to turn on.. Even Fallout works in 2k.
Windows XP, like all software, is only as good as the administrator in charge of it. I control literally HUNDREDS of Windows XP boxes as a hired gun administrator and none of them (none,zero, zip nada) have the kind of problems you describe.
I have an overclocked Athlon at home dual booting between SuSe 9.1 and Windows XP and do not have the problems you describe.
Windows XP Pro installed on my laptop (again dualboot to SuSe 9.1) running SP1 + SP2 and do not have the problems you describe.
I'm not particuraly trying to be an ass, but perhaps you should stop blaming the OS and look for another cause.
My years of experience with XP has taught me that functionally it spanks the crap out of any MS OS prior, INCLUDING Windows 2000.
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
It's EXPECTED not to work properly.
actually it *is* expected to work properly, that's the idea of going from Beta -> RC. The next step in the progression is RC -> Gold, at which point it better damn well work rather than should work.
my 2c
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
no that would make it bull Security Hardened Internet Technology
Join Team Mozilla #38050 Folding@home
I totally agree with the parent. If you want to know more about the Windows 2000 OS, read the book Inside Windows 2000 3rd Edition by Solomon and Russinovich and get to know Windows 2000 internals in detail. If you are one of the teen slashdot kiddies out to save the internet and this world by installing Linux on everything in sight and saying MS sucks, then that book isn't for you.
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).
Not to be offensive, but I don't buy it. Simply because you cannot configure your machine properly when overclocked isn't a good reason to claim XP is unstable....
Admittedly, it may imply that the Linux kernel handles exceptions, etc better than XP, but from what you're saying, I suspect the instablity is in your -system-.
I do most of my trolling these days IN JAPAN, but thanks muchly, bud! :D
Very interesting how (relatively) easy it is to uninstall all service packs from Win XP:
* Execute whatever DOS commands are in spuninst.txt
* Set a registry key to "LocalSystem"
* Execute spuninst\spuninst.exe
* Reboot to restore (most) drivers
Once this is done, the article says, all service packs are gone without a trace. This leaves the Win XP box in the state it would have been in on October 14, 2003, with all these vulnerabilities.
So much for security patches!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I use bestcrypt (kind of like a crypto loopback device, only for windows), and SP2 hosed it. The device driver won't load, and I still can't access any of my encrypted data.
I wonder what SP2 did that broke it?
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
What are you doing wrong??? I'm a network admin for about 100 Windows 2000 Pro workstations. I've NEVER had any problems loading them with SP4. Here's how I upgrade them to SP4:
1. Backup ALL pertinent information to a file server/other computer.
2. Use a Win2000 disk to format and install Win2000 by itself. Install any SCSI/RAID drivers here if you have to.
3. Install SP4 BEFORE you install anything else (including drivers).
4. Install all of the Windows Updates that are part of your Standard Operating Environment (SOE).
5. Install your hardware drivers.
6. Install the applications that are part of your SOE.
7. Copy the information that was backed up in step 1 back to this machine.
You now have a Win2000 SP4 box ready for use.
I recently did a format of my WinXP Partition, reinstalled, installed Service Pack 2, and haven't encountered any problems whatsoever to date.
p pro/maintain/winxpsp2.mspx l t.asp?icp=xpsp2&slcid=us /. ^_^)
I don't wave the banner of Microsoft, by any means, but I'm gonna have to refuse jumping on the "lol winblows sux!!11" bandwagon this time. Quote, from the mouth of the bloated giant itself:
WARNING!
This technical preview is unsupported and is intended for testing purposes only. Do not use in production environments.
Were you really expecting it to be perfect? The entire point of a beta test is to locate bugs and fix them.
Some useful links:
FAQ's, Deployment Guides, etc:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winx
SP2 Newsgroups:
http://communities.microsoft.com/newsgroups/defau
(Not that the newsgroups contain much pertinent information; almost as much anti-MS sentiment there as
My friends Deb and Ian saved me $189 too. And I don't even have to be 4 years out of date (hell even XP is ooooold). And I get all the software too.
My other car is first.
Yes, only integer men use linux.
Real men probably use BSD.
(Please, don't ask me what Complex men might use - I've not thought this through well enough to cope with that).
dude, I just overclocked it, set the bios to what some site on the internet said to(who really understands the BIOS anyways haha), and I've loaded every tweak tool there is, therefore XP is crap.
I even have NEON, so how can it be my system?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
The article mentions that they blue-screened and said "winserv" couldn't be found (I see no one bothered to Google it). First of all, I call bullsh*t as bluescreens are for hardware failures. Secondly, winserv is SPYWARE AKA A VIRUS. Why would they expect anything to install properly on those machines?
I've installed SP2 on about 40-50 machines with no probs. I say this article is anti-MS propaganda.
The parent article is just plain ridiculous. I'm the I.T. Director for a large organization, and practically the entire I.T. department is running SP2 RC2, busily finding out what it breaks (not as much as you'd think, actually). The idea that 3 out of 5 machines "didn't come back up" is either due to (a) really funky, odd hardware or (b) a really screwy WinXP core install. We've had a 100% upgrade success rate and no reason to complain thus far, and we've got way more than 5 systems done.
But it wouldn't matter if we had 100 systems that worked right because it's a statistically insignificant sample of the overall whole. Hey, I had a Linux box not come back up once because I updated the kernel 2.4 kernel package with a 2.5 development release package! I guess the 2.6 kernel needed to go back to testing big time, eh? Do you see the idiocy of the parent article's claim and further assumption?
But then again this is Slashdot, where no good bashing of Microsoft goes unheralded.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Here's a tip: By definition, if it's overclocked, it's not running in spec.
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).
I just attended a Microsoft-sponsored developers' seminar on the technical details and impact of Windows XP SP2. While most of the day was pretty boring, there was one item of interest regarding Microsoft's new security upgrade, Windows Firewall.*
.NET applications are not affected by the behavior of Windows Firewall, since they are invoked from distinct executables.
:( )
When the Firewall is enabled (and it is by default), any application that tries to bind to a port that is not specified as listenable in the firewall configuration will cause a friendly MS dialog to come up, asking the user if they want to allow incoming traffic on the port to be handled by [name of the application]. If the user clicks yes, a rule will be created, allowing the application to use the port. If the user clicks no, the application will be blacklisted, and will not receive inbound trafic from any network interfaces.
Blacklisted applications are still allowed to bind to ports, so they will not notice anything is wrong; they will just think there is no traffic.
Guess what happens if the application in question is Java? That's right, the Java Virtual Machine gets banned from listening to the network. Any Java app that subsequently tries to access a port will languish behind the firewall without any prompt to the user alerting him or her that their Java-based server or chat program is being blocked.
For the savvy, this issue is remedied fairly easily by configuring open ports for any apps that need them. But savvy users have never been Microsoft's target customer group, and one can easily imagine many SP2 initiates being taught the Microsoft way that Java technology just doesn't work.
Note that
Food for thought.
Nate (dateline Dallas-Ft.Worth on lay-over
* Replaces Internet Connection Firewall, offering simple but relatively (for MS) configurable protection against unsolicited network traffic.
My other
You'd be saving yourself a chunk of time if you just installed a slipstreamed SP4 Windows 2000 install.
As for the grandparent, people make a big deal out of simple Windows problems even as they downplay similar Linux problems. I don't even want to detail my network experiences with Slackware, Gentoo, and Red Hat 9. Ugh. We eventually went with XP.
Hm...
Am I the only one that runs Drive Image (or a similar tool) before running anything from MS Update?
Always.
I've had the thing crap out too damn many times to even consider updating w/o an image backup first.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
The idea of a servicepack is that you can use it to upgrade a live installation, just like with windows update. Reinstalling and then restoring data from a backup.. That's just.. wrong..
For one thing, what happens to stuff in the registry in odd places (HKLM)? Why isn't data already on a separate partition, if not a network (NAS/SAN) drive? Not using roaming profiles - are you mad? Why not using a slipstreamed install, or even better using ghost to duplicate disk images if you're using a "standard operating environment"?
You sound like some one who feels the need to format his hard drive every once in a while, "just in case".
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
There's lots of posts here about how they've have no problems with SP2... Well, I tried installing SP2-RC1 shortly after it became available, and it totally hosed that PC.
I couldn't even finish booting. XP Setup's recovery option couldn't even run. I had to reinstall XP from scratch, into a new folder, just to boot up. Couldn't install it into the same folder either (I didn't just pop in a bootdisk and delete C:\Windows because I wanted to save some of the files - too much to do via command prompt).
I then vowed that I wouldn't install SP2 until the final version had been out for a while, and nobody was reporting any problems.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
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.
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.
Off topic, but I just wanted to say that Fact Index is one of Wikipedia's mirror sites. If you want the most up to date info and don't like the ads, here's Wikipedia's article directly: Microsoft Bob
Is there anyone who hasn't posted a joke along the lines of "Windows 3.1 still rough around the edges?"
There sure are a lot of ACs posting this line. So far you've all missed the point. I'm not saying Windows is crap! I'm saying it's a very good business desktop but 2K and XP are not a bulletproof solution for all users.
Firstly, I have not mentioned Linux at all, so your insecurities are shining rather brightly.
Secondly, you're all talking about business environments with support and systems management available. I'm talking about single systems and small networks without full time "professional" management. I think Win2K is pretty good and generally quite stable, but people who trump Windows 2K or XP as being the shiznit for clueless users are wrong. Yesterday I fixed 3 machines that clueless users has managed to render inoperable in their daily usage. Two suffered significant filesystem corruption, all three suffered from application and registry problems. That is not the hallmark of a rock-solid OS.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
Are you being funny and the mods didn't get it, or were you being serious and your "insightful" mods are a bit of a reach? I mean, your advice is sound and your process is good but the process you describe, by definition, is *not* an upgrade. It's closer to a migration. An upgrade is like what I do on OS X:
1) hear about a new update being available
2) read forums for a day or two to see if there's anything catastrophic (like the old "hard drive name starts with a space" bug)
3) system prefs -> software update -> check now -> install
4) reboot
OTOH, Mac OS X has not had a single, automatically-spreading, remote root exploit worm in the 3 years it has been out, so to be honest, I don't even really concern myself with updates. I mean, not with a gotta-have-it, zero-day urgency.
Besides, how in the hell is the average user supposed to know what EVERY SINGLE PIECE of pertinant information is? And what if they have tons of songs and movies--are they supposed to buy a whole external drive just to run a damn system update? Even if they do, there will still be a thousand little things to be done--little preferences to be set, arrange the desktop icons, browser history is gone so links are blue again, etc etc etc.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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
I work at Microsoft. They asked us to upgrade our SP1 machines to the latest build of SP2. I started with a test box (for which I have Ghost images), and that went quite well. I moved on to two other boxes that I use for parallel builds (no Ghost images, but nothing lost if they die), and they came back up just great. At that point I was confident enough to upgrade my main system. Again, no trouble. All of my updates were done via the "Windows Update" web site.
While the first 3 machines were VERY clean machines (essentially XP + patches + antivirus, no other software installed and no major configuration changes), the 4th machine was my work machine -- I've probably installed or uninstalled something from my box every day for the past year (but I'm still on the original install of Windows). While I know how to keep the machine operating well, it definitely isn't a clean box.
As with any upgrade or patch, there are risks. But I had absolutely no trouble with the upgrade on any of the 4 machines. The only difference is that the firewall pops up a message box every once in a while asking if I want to allow a connection. Oh, the "Settings and Preferences" link from the Antitrust settlement was "restored" (how many times do I have to delete that thing?).
Nothing is ever perfect, especially with software. But Microsoft has tried very hard to make sure this will work well for everybody. And as far as I can tell, they've done a good job. Yes, there will be some bugs. Yes, you'll want to be careful about applying this to production machines (make backups!). But I think the majority of people will upgrade and have no trouble.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
A message stated that "winserv" was missing.
u gin.html seems to confirm my suspisions.
winserv is not application which would be needed at boot time.
It looks like a spyware to me.
http://www.spyany.com/program/article_spy_rm_IEPl
Obiviuosly SP2 RC2 didn't hose the machine. It was a spyware
AmigaOS 4, with Duke Nukem Forever installed.
I installed SP2 RC2 on my machine at work to test it with our latest application we're building. While I only had issues configuring my firewall to allow port 80 traffic, it did kill my Outlook. We are required to use Outlook so I don't have any choice on swapping over to Firebird or any other alternative, but anyway...now I only have a 10 minute check for email from our Exchange server. If I want to check for urgent emails I otherwise need to shutdown and restart Outlook over and over. It gets very not fun after 3 hours. I suppose I could remove SP2 for now, but who knows what kind of effect that would have on my workstation.
-my other sig is your mom
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?
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!
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.
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.
At our company, our login script will call a PERSONAL.BAT file if it exists in your user directory.
So I have the login script change registry entry preferences for things that I find exceedingly annoying. Like now I have explorer default to detailed view, show hidden files, yada yada...
If we had clippy showing up, that preference would have been in my personal login script.
I take it you don't know how to do something similar?