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The Verdict on WinXP SP2?
A reader writes: "Now that time has passed, people have been giving their opinions as to the effectiveness of Windows SP2. The jury has been good, but mixed." The ITMJ Product Guide is part of OSTG; what's been your, if any, experiences with SP2?
It's been running for nearly six months now on my Thinkpad T40 (I was in the beta program) and I've never had a problem. I've been able to take off my software firewall and let Windows handle it. No stability issues or compatiblility issues.
;)
A job well done, though it'll pain a moderator to let that last comment stand.
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1) Search no longer working
2) Windows installer no longer working
and the fixes MS lists involve long registry edits that don't usually work. And these problems happen on most machines I put SP2 on. :-\
All the user was getting was the occasional script error in IE when submitting something via a form. Updating IE to the latest version seems like a perfectly valid thing to do as any corrupted DLL or config files would be replaced.
There were no updates from Windows Update except for SP2. As SP2 is officially endorsed by Microsoft you would assume that if the PC was working before the upgrade then it would continue to work after the upgrade was installed, right?
There is no denying the fact that SP2 was responsible for making the PC reset part-way through the bootup procedure.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
You must have a Creative sound card or something. Their drivers for 2000/XP have always been terrible. If you have a SBLive! or Audigy, I recommend getting the kX Project Audio Drivers. They're third party and do a lot of the basic things better than the orginal drivers do. It has things like a fully customizable bus and surround filters so you can upmix stereo music to surround - something Creative dumped when they moved on from Windows 98. EAX is supposedly not supported, but surround seems to be working just fine for me.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
It can depend a lot on your hardware.
If you're unlucky and have a notebook from Acer before October, it's at risk of crashing horribly, for example. Acer said they didn't support SP2 before that date and refuse to give support for any problems caused by their conflicting drivers they didn't fix before SP2 went RTM, by testing with the numerous public SP2 betas.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
There isn't a way to block outgoing access, as it is an incoming only firewall. Good catch :)
I never said it could do outgoing, and I did say that there are better alternatives out there. Don't get me wrong, I know the firewall in SP2 is limited, but I also know that the information the parent poster provided was completely inaccurate. MeErely wanted to clear up a few things.
And yes, you are entirley correct. The custom section does have that minor exploit, but since the SP2 is targetted moreso with home users 255.255.255.0 would only be their brother/father's/sisters/dog's computer on the same network as them, and thus only someone on the same home network could have unlimited access with default FW configurations. Of course, if I'm wrong please correct me. Also, if a buisness or anyone other than a typical home user network wanted to focus on security, then let's hope their tech knows enough to have a hardware firewall/router and not depend upon software alternatives.
"We're breaking out the ramen noodles. . . "
"Really? Is it someone's birthday?"
I'm running a not so cutting edge AMD64 (2800+) and had until recently had few problems. This last weekend I rebooted the machine (since it was acting a little slow and hadn't been rebooted in weeks) and suddenly I can't even start up propely without a DEP happening. And it happens with windows explorer! As you can imagine this was not nice.
After having to boot into command prompt safe mode and editing the boot.ini file, I managed to get my machine functioning fine again. AntiVirus (trend pc-cillan) claims the machine is clean, I hope it is because it seems that I can now only work with DEP set to AlwaysOff.
Other than that I have had not real issues with SP2 other than the expected things where stuff was changed from "on by default" to "off by default"
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It tells me those machines are pretty typical. I work for a tier 1 helpdesk on a fairly large (~20k people) campus, mainly supporting student machines. After SP2 was released, nearly half my problems were "SP2 not installing cleanly" problems. I've had a lot of different issues -- mostly networking (a full stack reset after uninstalling SP2 usually fixes these), but quite a few more serious errors like "Unmountable Boot Volume" in a blue-screen loop after installation. As far as failure rate, I'd have to say SP2 is the worst update as far as failure rate goes.
The root cause of a lot of these problems are viruses, spyware, and adware, which is funny because those problems are what SP2 is supposed to fix. Anything that mucks around with any system files gives SP2 fits, especially the network stack. Luckily, most people have either got SP2 now, or have automatic updates disabled until such time as they can reinstall Windows so that they can update their machines again.