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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.
Windows XP SP2... codename Longhorn =)
Actually the computers not turning back on is one of the new security features....
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.