Ready or Not, Here comes Windows XP SP2

TheViffer writes "Beginning April 12, 2005 Microsoft will remove all temporary blocking of Windows XP SP2 by automatic update and Windows update which it has granted to those organizations that requested it. So unless you run Software Update Service (SUS), chances are you will get a mix of SP1 and SP2 running at the same time. Let's just hope you have these programs that are known to experience a loss of functionality when they run on a Windows XP Service Pack 2-based computer and these programs that seem to stop working after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2 patched, upgraded, or removed. Might be a good time for help desk personal to pencil in a week (or two) of vacation."

Comments

A Good Thing

[Skuggamara]

In my humble opinion, this is a good thing. I run a decent sized IT shop, and I feel that not upgrading to SP2 is akin to connecting your computer/network to the internet without a firewall.

Re:A Good Thing

[AndroidCat]

SP2 comes with a firewall..? :) (They might call it a firewall, but a lot of home users will be surprised when they use subnet for file-sharing and open it up to a 255.255.255.0 on their ISP. And the lack of egress blocking is bad when all MS software wants to talk to the Internet.) "Better than nothing" isn't much of a selling point, except for very small values of nothing.

Why SP2

[Beetjebrak]

What does SP2 seriously add to the corporate desktop? Admittedly I haven't been in charge of windows desktops since Win2K, but I can't immediately see any advantage. Only support nightmares concerning the builtin firewall. Is a personal firewall really needed on every secretary's desk? I would hope not... they're not supposed to run any unauthorized services other than those required for remote control/remote software deployment.

Re:Hrmm

[rebill]

The simplest program ever was a 0-byte file in IBM's MVS operating system. (That O/S had some utilities that could only be accessed by running a "program" - and to get the utility to run without actually doing anything ... well, the solution was a program that literally did nothing).

The funny thing was, someone wrote a Problem Tracking Report (i.e. "Bug") about this, and had the MVS team change the program - the flaw was that the return code register was being set in the utility, but the 0=byte program was not copying this result code into it's own return register, so the program was returning a "success" evem when a failure had occurred.

We co-ops got a chuckle out of it because of the "bugs per line of code" calculation would have had a div-by-zero problem :).

Scientific software is disproportionally affected

[tetromino]

One of my relatives works in a biochemical research lab. All of their computers are WinXP Sp1 because Sp2 basically broke every single program and driver they relied on for their daily calculations, data acquisition, and analysis (some of the software is commercial, and some was custom-written by people who are currently residing in Eastern Europe and Brazil). Naturally, every worm outbreak hits them hard -- but they think it's worth it to clean up a worm once every couple of months rather than struggle with their bread-and-butter programs locking up on Sp2.

Sp2 is great for the average Joe who uses his box for email and pr0n, but if you are using your computer as a scientific instrument, then installing Sp2 changes (and breaks) too many things.

(In case you are wondering, the reason they don't switch to Linux is that some of their data acquisition hardware doesn't have good Linux drivers)

MS is doing the right thing

[ztirffritz]

I'm not an avid supporter of MS, but I believe that credit should be given when and where it is due. SP2 is a GOOD thing. Yes it breaks some things, but that is the price you pay for past mistakes. MS realized that they had 2 choices: 1) continue supporting a horribly flawed system 2) break the cycle, back up, fix the problems and start again. They made the daring choice to back up and start again. That is impressive for a company with a multibillion dollar product with 90% market share. It still isn't perfect, but I think that they know that. They're hoping that Longhorn will solve many of these problems. Maybe they're right, who knows though. At least they tried to help everyone out by fixing the product, giving people time to adopt and adapt, and are firm enough to stick to a schedule, knowing that the fix will only really help if EVERYONE is upgraded. KUDOS to MS. (Someone better take note of this moment, it may never happen again.)

Re:Never mind the fact....

[Zeinfeld]

SP2 is better, that really isn't a point of argument. The only thing that nags at me is why Microsoft didn't do this ten or so years ago, when home users were beginning to connect to the Internet in large numbers. It isn't like stack protection is new technology, nor is having basic firewall functionality available.

Until the Windows 98-XP transition was completed there was no point. There is no way to make Win 98 secure, too much support for legacy systems. Sure you could do a firewall, but it would be too easy for a trojan to disable it. I don't think the stack protection scheme would work in Win-98.

We waited ten years for Apple to get its act together and finaly release OS-X and give us basic memory protection.

The hold up here is because there are a bunch of corporate IT departments who have not got arround to making XP SP2 deployment a priority which in turn is because many of them have a small number of apps that are not SP2 compliant.

All I use my machine for is Office, IE and Visual Studio. But I have to wait until they have checked out several hundred Oracle, Clarify etc. apps.