Microsoft has Delayed SP2, Again
I_am_Rambi writes "According to news.com.com "Microsoft has again delayed a long-awaited update to Windows XP, citing quality concerns. The company had planned to wrap up development this week on Windows XP Service Pack 2, but a Microsoft representative said late Wednesday that the software giant had decided that more work was needed on the update before if could be released to manufacturing." Yea, if 3 out of 5 machines failed to come back up, it needs some polishing."
The whole "three out of five machines failed to come back up" after installing SP2 RC2 should not frighten you from trying it.
The original article said quit clearly that the problem they had was that they'd get a bluescreen and "A message stated that 'winserv' was missing."
What the article didn't say was what "winserv" actually is. It's not part of Windows. In fact, it is spyware. Plain and simple.
So the problem, then, with Windows XP SP2 RC2 is that it doesn't work when the operating system has been corrupted beyond repair by spyware that hooks into various DLLs and services in an attempt to prevent itself from being uninstalled.
My Install of SP2 RC1 caused explorer.exe to crash on start up. I also took about 10mins for XP to boot and login. There is no spyware/trojans on my computer.
Seems like you just have to remove the "it." prefix in the URL then it comes out okay, "http://it.slashdot.org/.." to "http://slashdot.org/.." for example.
People are installing SP2 internally all over the place and I certainly haven't heard of "3 out of 5" computers dying. In fact I haven't heard anything bad at all.
I have been running SP2 since RC1 with no problems myself.
It's interesting to note that the 'Automatic Updates' service must be set to 'Automatic' and be running in order for Windows Update to work through IE. Even if you choose not to use Automatic Updates (as I have), you *must* have the service running all the time for Windows Update to work (or change it to Automatic each time before going to Windows Update in IE). Rather annoying.
Not that hard - people could use this superb little tool for a start...