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XP SP2 Adoption Lagging Overseas
Vizquel wrote to mention an eWeek article reporting that Microsoft is frustrated with the lack of Service Pack 2 usage overseas. From the article: "During a keynote at the Security Summit East here, McKee said Microsoft has so far distributed more than 250 million copies of XP SP2 to provide a hardened shell around the operating system but the low upgrade levels remains a disappointment."
I don't know, maybe he's not trolling. Not only do I not like SP2 for the reasons I'll get into below, I still run Win2K SP4 on most of the PCs on this lan. The one exception is a R40 which came with XP and I haven't had the time to upgrade to win2k, as all it does is delete spam and I don't really work with it that much. All I've done is reset it to the Classic interface but you can still smell the XP Inside.
In August another machine with a factory XP install which had gotten SP2 died mysteriously overnight after accepting yet another automatic Windows update. A random windows corruption happens, but doubt was thrown when one of the WIn2k machines lost windows the next week so I turned off all automated updating from Microsoft. I didn't like them auto-rebooting anyway.
Both these machines' drives scanned clean in postmortem, they run behind a hardware firewall, and we also run zonealarm and F-Prot AV. They all have IE but it's rarely used and it's encased in the popupcop wrapper anyway. All software is paid for, the products are all together in case of a BSA visit. I'm done with updating, these things run beautifully as long as MS doesn't fuck with them. Frankly, Windows Genuine Advantage and Microsoft XP Product Activation gives me the willies. WTF do they harass paying customers while the pirates get away with their custom disks w/ no activation. XP SP2 sucks, beyond the gross Fisher-Price interface, there are certain problems, expecially pertaining to deleting files from flash cards that XP suffers from, that make it unusable in my business.