Slashdot Mirror
Survey Shows Admins Avoiding SP2
bonch writes "Tom's Hardware Guide is running an article about Windows XP Service Pack 2 and its limited acceptance by IT administrators. AssetMetrix is cited in the article as reporting that fewer than 24% of over 136,000 Windows XP PCs in 251 North American corporations even had SP2 installed. THG goes on to describe the reasons given by admins and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of installing SP2."
Only ones I have seen on the list Microsoft publishes have been programs that need access through Windows Firewall. Sometimes it's easy to fix it....most times it isn't. Windows Firewall woul dbe MUCH better if:
It let you open the ports you need, with plenty of warning message of what may/may not happen.
Do more active scanning of the packets coming in and going out for malicious packets.
Windows Firewall is not enough in someways, but too much and not fine grained enough in control in other ways.
Gorkman
From technet article:
See here for a fix.
I think, therefore I am. I think?
I'd like to have the NX bit enabled to improve security, but it's not worth it if it causes so much software to crash. The thing that worries me is that most people wouldn't have a clue about any of this, so would just be stuck with a choice between crashing applications or removing SP2.
That may be, but we've heard people raving for years about MS security, most of which comes down to legacy support and the inherently bad design decisions in the code that supports that. So, they're starting to fix things, slowly. We've all predicted applications aren't going to work any longer when they make the change. But that's really just too bad. We can't really have it both ways; it wasn't done right the first time, so we either get security, or we get legacy application support. Not both.
What they are saying is that if you like your computing experience to be all-Microsoft this is the way to go. Otherwise you'd be much better off with a different browser, email client and personal firewall!!
The latest gadget news and reviews. www.absolutegadget.com
XP Sp2 limiting the number of connection/sec
It does not. It limits the number of pending connections. The biggest problem with this in relation to p2p is that clients often report IP/ports that are unreachable due to firewall/NAT. Hit 10 of those and you can't open any more connections for a while. Also very annoying if you hit a web page where the image server is down. 10 images you can't load? Tarpitted. Personally, I've changed this long ago.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's got a lot of strikes against it:
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The parent post is moderated as "Funny", but that's what happened to us. We installed SP2 on numerous machines. There were a variety of problems. Re-installing SP2 and rebooting several times often cured the problems. Sometimes it was necessary to reload the entire Windows SP2 operating system.
We troubleshot one of the problems and discovered that SP2 expects that a particular file exists on the target computer, before it has copied that file. So, if the version that was already on the target computer is not recent enough, SP2 will crash. We reported this to Microsoft, but there was only a spacey response, as though confusion reigned. Microsoft did not seem to have the capacity to respond sensibly.
SP2 has numerous fixes for problems with USB 2.0. USB operated much better for us after SP2 was installed.
Microsoft gives us the impression that the company has a sloppy management style supervising coders who are not given enough time to do a good job. If you don't install SP2, you are not giving Microsoft the opportunity to fix some of its bugs. Someone once said that the Microsoft motto was "The whole world is our beta test site." According to that, Windows XP SP2 is just the first release version of Windows XP. We had many, many time-consuming problems with the pre-SP1 version; in our opinion, it was not ready for release; it could be made to work, but it was a time-waster. Maybe it's foolish to believe that two billionaires could care what happens to the less rich.
All of our Microsoft OS computers are now using SP2 with all the most recent critical updates, with no unexplained problems for months.
Be careful with Windows XP updates other than critical updates. Someone made a mistake and updated a computer here recently with a recommended hardware driver. The name of the driver on the Windows Update web site is different from the name of the driver once installed. That computer has never had an "HP wireless keyboard" attached to it.
Oddly enough, I had the opposite happen. Okay, keeping in mind that probably 95% of what I use my computer for revolves around browsing, e-mail and games, I wasn't having that many problems before, but I was getting the occassional (like once every two or three days) complete freeze-up of World of Warcraft. After SP2 was installed, it has happened once. And that more likely had to do with me running WinAMP and a web browser at the same time, alt-tabbing between them to look up item drop rates and changing playlists.
Yes, it's not 100% perfect. No upgrade ever is. Especially considering the staggering amount of code in XP. But for some of us, it's working just fine.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Actually there is a way to fix it http://www.lvllord.de/?url=tools
We participated in the private betas for months and months. Found several bugs and app compat issues - got them either resolved or worked around. Shipped it to our users, and are currently at 90% of our 60,000 machines. I can't claim that there have been no problems. There have been some web sites that need work (due to some of the new restrictions in IE) and some apps that are used by only a few users that have some problems - but in the main, this has gone extremely well. I honestly can't figure out why people are waiting on this.
It seems incredibly disingenous of people to on the one hand say, "Windows is full of holes, help us here Microsoft, we are bleeding." and on the other hand say, "well, that's nice but I'd rather keep bleeding than spend the time and effort to apply the fix."
Get with the program IT Admins! Work with the vendors of the apps if you have to, get the firewall exceptions in and SHIP this already!
We use Great Plains too. If you had actually done some research and realized you needed to use one of the last 2 revisions you would've been fine. :)
The MS knowledge base has nothing, correct. The Source knowledge base(Great Plains support) has lots of documentation.