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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?
The article's like totally content-free. If you've vaguely heard of XP SP2 before it adds nothing.
And there are no user reviews on the site - the four-day old "discussion" has been "archived".
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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Wow talk about relevant... I was at someone's house last night and they had just downloaded Service Pack 2. They were having problems with Internet Explorer so they hoped SP2 would fix it so they let the computer chew away for 5 minutes, then once it was installed they rebooted.
The computer got 5 seconds in to loading Windows before getting a BSOD (which lasted less than a second) before rebooting again.
And again. And again.
After 5/6 crashes it was obvious SP2 had royally fucked the PC up. Luckily we managed to boot up in Safe Mode and use System Restore to undo the effects of SP2 and now the computer is working normally (in fact, the IE problems seem to have gone!).
Now I am very dubious about installing SP2 at work, I think we'll be forced to upgrade before long but MS clearly still have some bugs to squash.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
My experience?
Since installing it on my brother's computer, my Mum and Dad's c computer. I've found myself having more time to watch TV, then trying to rid their computers of adaware and trying to explain to them why hundreds of screens pop up all the time.
I am not a Windows fan by any lengths, but hey. It's saved me some hassles so I am a happy camper.
Please keep the Service Pack 2 shot my mother and buggered my dog posts to a minimum.
Thanks,
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. :-\
You must be new here. We're all closet Windows users.
Quiz: How many of you run Linux only? Now how many of you are blown away by Half-Life 2? I rest my case.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
"After spending an hour on the phone with Microsoft's India-based support team, I resolved the problem. Unfortunately, I never figured out the cause or the fix; things were just suddenly working."
HE resolved the problem without knowing the cause or what he did! WOWSA, it's like magic DOODZ! Better grab this guy for your support team, he's worth his weight in gold!
MS Hint: When speaking to Indian based MS support, for best results, hop up and down three times on left leg. Please contact support if leg is inoperative, leg is missing, or gravitational challange is experienced. A patch will be provided.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
What does that mean? The people who are judging the product consists of white and black males and females,with some straight, gay, disabled etc representatives?
Or do they mean that the verdict was good, but mixed. Which means...mixed, and not good.
It looks like the grammar and spelling of the articles posted here are being dumbed down to the level of most of the comments!
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.
I think the situation is very simple.
SP2 improves security. This is Good.
Some applications rely on insecure functionality. This is Bad.
SP2 breaks some of these applications. If this affects you, you will need to find different applications before you install SP2, or secure your system in a different way.
The upshot is that Real operating systems and applications are not affected by this.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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?"
An admission of defeat to install a firewall by default?
Every linux distro I've installed in the past 8 years has come with a firewall on by default, and most of them were configurable during the install.
I guess it isn't only MS that's defeated.
Bummer.
B
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone keeps bashing SP2 so much, I decided I'd even this up a bit.
Although I'm not an NT admin, I did install SP2 in a couple of places, and here's my take:
1. Added a simple, probbably far-from-what-we-here-on-/.-would-call-decent but TURNED-ON-BY-DEFAULT firewall to joe-clueless-user. IMHO, this will severely reduce virus infections on the vast amount of joe-user machines that are not properly mainained with good up-to-date malware-protection.
Yes, a minority of 'joe-average's will have stuff break due to this, but the majority will benefit.
2. Enabled windows update by default. Again, will severely increase resilience of a vast number of joe-poorly-mainained-user boxen.
3. Tags files that were downloaded from the internet as such, and gives a proper warning when attempting to execute it. Another simple idea that will decrease suffering of people from malware.
4. [...Finally] added a decent popup blocker.
5. IP configuration GUI improvements. After 9 years of renewing a DHCP lease from the command line, they finally put a "right-click-on-tray-icon--->>REPAIR" option that gets a new one. right-click-->STATUS was also complemented with a new tab that... SHOWS MY IP ADDRESS. BRILLIANT!
Sheesh, and it only took them 9 years. Buy hey, better late than never, I say.
6. After 2 years with flaky, unstable, bugged, alpha, crappy user UNfriendly blowatware bluetooth drivers based on the WIDCOMM "my-dog-can-write-better-software" SDK, Microsoft finally threw in their long awaited BT stack. And boy, was it a sight for sore eyes. It supports all my BT plugs out-of-the-box, Its simple and intuitive to use, and works like charm. BT network driver works great, as does syncing with PDA and a symbian phone. No more 30-minute battles with the Nokia suite, the BT tray icon that stopped responding and a guess-list of 12 serial port drivers to sync my phone with Outlook.
I tip my hat to MS for issuing an *excelent* BT driver suite, albeit 2 years overdue.
And yes, they crippled raw packet API on the TCP/IP stack, so nmap had to write a little workaround.
So go ahead and bash MS all you like, but as far as both myself and quite a clueless family members I inevitably get to support are concerned, SP2 did good. If fewer people have to spend their time, money and nerves treating virus-related computer problems, all the better.
Kudos Microsoft, and thats coming from a hardcore UNIX geek and fulltime Linux/Solaris admin.
Flame away kids.
-
Turning it off is not that easy, at least for me. I logged in as admin ("Owner") and turned off the firewall. Then I logged off and logged back in as a normal user (myself), and the firewall was turned back on! And since I didn't have admin privileges, I couldn't turn it off. So I logged off and back in as Owner, and it was off.
Finally, some combination of turning ot off, rebooting, logging in, turning off, etc, finally got my user account to turn the thing off (I use ZoneAlarm Pro). However, when my wife logs in on her user account, the firewall is on again, and she can't turn it off.
Otherwise I haven't had any problems with SP2. I disabled the security center process too while trying to figure this mess out.
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.
SP2 is the first verion of Windows to support Blue Tooth.. and it is a GREAT improvement over using vendor supplied drivers and utilities.
Oh yeah.. the WiFi support and interface is MUCH bettter too.
OK, now please breathe deeply, step back, cut the implied ad hominem attacks, and think.
The problem here is not the malware, unless a patch in SP2 is intended to remove that malware. The malware is, well, "mal", but it was before anyway. The problem is that installing SP2 on many systems is making the situation worse. Please see my reply to the AC, and note the trivial steps that could be taken to fix most of the mess in the situation you guys are describing. Also consider that if installing SP2 results in more downtime than all the security flaws in recent history, as has been the case for many of the people I know who've been brave enough to try it, maybe that's not progress.
Then you might like to check the numerous tales of woe from technically competent people whose systems were swept for the usual gremlins before the install, but who still had their OS taken out. Blaming the mess entirely on malware is a cop-out, unless you consider installing the only drivers available for numerous hardware devices, which worked fine prior to SP2, to be installing malware on your system.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.