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Windows XP SP3 Creating Havoc
ozmanjusri writes "According to Information Week, within hours of its wide availability Windows XP SP3 had drawn hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their computers. One user said in a Microsoft newsgroup: 'I downloaded and installed [the SP3] package for IT Professionals and Developers on one of my computers. Now I can't get the computer to boot. I don't think Microsoft should have made this a critical update.' Other sites including IT Wire are also reporting problems, which include include random reboots or the inability to boot at all." Note that XP3 won't install on systems running beta IE8; and after a successful SP3 install users will no longer be able to downgrade from IE7 to IE6.
One could make a similar statement about SP3.
Not that I'm a MS fan-boy, far from it.
Sooooo? Is there going to be an SP3a?
Did anyone else get this? Microsoft really screwed this one up. Not only did they release an AUTOMATIC UPDATE that cannot be installed unless you close your antivirus (which isn't possible for my company's antivirus - the only choice is to unload it from the workstation), or to run this utility that changes permissions on all registry values and windows files, BUT they ALSO provided instructions that only make sense in a VISTA environment. For example, telling people to right-click and go to Run As Administrator, or referencing "defltbase.inf", which is a file you only find in Vista.
Patch size (in MB) = X
(X * 3)/100 = T
T = Time patch is ready for release to public (from microsoft release date, in months).
This puts Service Pack 3 general release for February 2009, and i'm not touching it until then.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
You mean people actually install service packs? I haven't done that since... well.. since before windows 2000. I guess not everyone can just back up their files, slipstream the latest service pack and do a clean install. OK, just kidding thats not practical at all, but that's a shame, cause everyone would benefit from a clean install of XPSP3.
My XP vm has never been smoother.
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
It's funny that to fix Microsoft Windows, it's faster to just wipe and re-install from scratch rather than try to fix the issue.
I always wonder, how did this become an acceptable state of affairs in IT?
The dominant OS in the world easiest way to fix is by re-installing!! Just seems weird, and describes yet another problem with the computer industry.
Isn't that that the case with most operating systems?
I doubt it was really faster in the long run, once you factor in copying my data back over, reinstalling programs, etc. It took the better part of a day to get things back to what I consider a usable state for my personal laptop with all my data.
A repair install would have probably taken about an hour, give or take.
As I said, I felt more comfortable starting from scratch and going that route, because I figured it would be the most trouble-free in the long run. A repair install may have had it up and running much sooner.
I just bought a Lenovo laptop with XP Pro for my wife that came yesterday. The first thing I did after all the initial registration, etc. was to run Windows update. To my surprise, SP3 was available so I installed it. After the install, TCP/IP would not work at all. I called Lenovo and they told me to reload from restore partition - SP3 wipes out TCP/IP for that laptop. After the reload, I updated individual fixes (64 of them) and turned off Automatic Updates so it won't try to slip in SP3 again.
It's not just Windows where this is the accepted practice. On multiple occasions I've brought in ailing MacBooks (and MacBook Pros) to the Apple store and the only advice the "geniuses" have had for fixing the problem has been a clean reinstall.
It's frustrating, yes. But I don't think the problem is the product, nor the industry. The real problem is that operating systems are complex beasts. The consumer has spoken quite clearly that the most important thing is new features and functionality, not stability. Someday hopefully we'll have our cake and eat it too, but for the time being I don't think we'll be getting away from these issues.
I've had the opposite experience. In dealing with hundreds of customer PCs, I have only had a handful where a repair install did not fix the issue and a wipe and reload was necessary.
There are certainly plenty of times when it is a toss-up, and the repair install will be acceptable, but the clean install will be best. However, repair installs have been generally favorable in my experience.
...and on another note, has anyone noticed that 99% of wikipedia's screenshots of windows apps have gone from XP to Vista? It's almost as if something, some...strange force, is trying to convince me that anything less than Vista will get me laughed at...
how did this become an acceptable state of affairs in IT?
I don't know about "acceptable" but it became a necessary way of operating when Microsoft switched Windows away from INI files to the registry. Windows 3.x systems had maybe 5 or 10 INI files that mattered (i.e. that you had to hand-tweak from time to time). Each rarely had more than 100 lines in it. Maybe a couple hundred thousands bytes all in. And if we needed a driver, it was usually a driver _file_ (except video drivers).
Today systems are ridiculously complicated. Windows 3.x would not even load, let alone run, if it was installed on a partition with the number of files an XP system has (over 100,000). Just the number of files alone would sink it (try it with more than about 60,000 files if you don't believe me).
On the other hand, install systems have kept pace with the complexity. Instead of shovelling 7 floppies (Windows 3.x) into a PC in 15 to 20 minutes, we have CD (XP) and DVD (Vista) installs that take the same (order of magnitude) time to install, despite 10 to 100 to 1000 times the increase in complexity. So, re-installing wins.
With DOS, we knew our systems down to the individual file level.
With Windows 3.x, we knew our systems down to the INI level.
With XP, we know our systems down to the Windows Update/services.msc level.
With Vista, we just know our system sucks.
I come here for the love
That was always my problem with Macs, and why I switched to PCs a long time ago. On my PC, compared to on my Macs, I was relatively encouraged to understand and tweak my system.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Still I have to do a complete reinstall if I want to get this SP working I'm afraid...
More like a problem with society as a whole, really.
Car's making funny noises? You could take it to one of those corrupt auto dealers... nah, better to sell it and buy a new one.
Don't like where you live? You could invest time and money into fixing it up... but why not just move?
OS not running right? You could try to fix it... but wouldn't it take less time just to reinstall?
Don't like your job? You could learn to accept it and work to better yourself there... or quit and find a new one.
Human beings, as a generla rule, prefer the path with the least work for the most reward... or least pain.
the theory- http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
the goal http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html
a practical consequence -http://davisfreeberg.com/2008/01/03/bad-copp-no-netflix/
And:
broken sound API's (change for change sake)
Lack of drivers for older hardware
Useless on older machines with just 512 MB of RAM
too many versions
SP1 released just last month
Did I mention the DRM? http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/vistas-multimedia-mess/
As someone already mentioned, MS has 2 OS's in competition, and the newer one is losing. Why is it surprising that they would provide a "fix" to XP that makes it less desirable? Let's face it- they could have put out SP3 at any time in the last three years, and should have. They took the time to pull SP3 last week when it was conflicting with some MS Point of Sale software, but they don't have the resources to test it on any HP systems with AMD cpus's?
The Internet has no garbage collection
First off, you shouldn't have posted this as AC. Aside from that, I totally agree with you.
/.ers, is that they lied about the sys reqs. My roomate has a laptop that has no business running it, and it really really sucks.
I am also not an apologist, and you can flame me to ashes for saying this, but I haven't had very many problems at all with Vista (outside of them releasing updates that make the cracks stop working).
The biggest issue with it for normal end users, not
A few disclaimers:
1 - I am a gamer, had a system that was well beyond the req's that they should have used in the first place, and it runs fine.
2 - I never pay for anything except online games(flame me for that too if you want), so the DRM stuff doesn't matter to me.
3- I totally agree that you would be out of your mind to install it in a business environment in it's current state, and with the current cost of the machines you would need to run it.
4- The fact that they are planning on discontinuing XP is preposterous. When you release a new version of anything users should want to upgrade, not be forced to.
Absolutely no interest in a "but M$ is evil" or a "but you don't realize that it does xyz" argument, just giving my experience with Vista.
The problem is that MS has stopped thinking about "advantage for the user" at least 10 years ago.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"It's funny that to fix Microsoft Windows, it's faster to just wipe and re-install from scratch rather than try to fix the issue."
Have you read some of the news reports about foreclosed home being stripped of plumbing, wiring, appliances, fixtures, even doors and windows? Some (many?) of these are proving to be cheaper to just rip it down and build new when the market comes back. Maybe even cheaper than waiting for someone to start up a meth lab and blow the whole thing to toothpicks.
It's *usually* faster and easier to rebuild a Windows XP/2K machine than to fix any of so many nasty malware infestations. And '9x/ME machines need to be removed from the 'Net and recycled. Ask Microsoft. BTW, tag that admission *honest*. A rarity for Microsoft, and typical that they would exercise it in an admission of OS security failure.
But that's just the way it is. I started spending my anti-malware research time optimizing data recovery and reinstallation, rather than disinfection. So much more effective to nuke the site from orbit.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If only I had mod points. This is the most insightful comment I've seen on this topic today.
Microsoft even warns quite emphatically not to install service packs on a system that may have viruses, spyware, or any other system problems. The anatomy of a MS service pack is not designed to solve problems, it's designed to update OS components. I'll be the first to admit I make a lot of money supporting Microsoft products, but obviously the design of MacOS and Linux are technically superior when it comes to updates - not that the process is foolproof and it's certainly not any easier.
Sometimes when a component is fixed to prevent a problem, those who already have the problem need to straighten out that issue first or the fix won't work. What MS should do is provide a thorough system scan that runs prior to the SP install that will tell you if you can expect any issues and recommend clean install if necessary.
You are correct in believing that US regular users just want the computers to work without our input. I don't care how it prints but I do care that it took 2.5 hrs. this morning to get a printer installed. Time wasted that I can never get back. I could have started a new a new business with the time I have spent trying to fix computer problems. We do task faster but lose the productivity trying to keep the systems working or lose profits with IT personal on site. How do we ever win?
In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000?
By artificially limiting the number of active connections?
By providing more bells and whistles slowing things down?
Better support for hyperthreading and dual core is the only thing I can think of, but even that could easily have been implemented in a service pack for W2k.
You know what? Had the manufacturers continued to put out drivers for Windows 2000 Professional, I would still be using it instead of Windows XP Professional. I can do without the default Fisher-Price interface, Windows activation & higher systems requirements that I, as a normal user, see as the only difference between XP and 2000.
Even as a computer professional, I'm hard pressed to think of any benefit to running Windows XP Professional instead of Windows 2000 Professional that either was not forced on us (drivers only available for XP) or purposely withheld to `encourage` the upgrade (Internet Explorer 7 won't install on 2000.)
XP was a "service pack" for 2000, for lack of a better term. It added some new graphics, and some extra support for home users, but XP is so much like 2000 it's hardly a unique OS. Saying it's better is like saying OS X 10.3 was better than 10.1. Of course it is, and 10.3 was a fair overhaul of OS X, but a whole new OS? no, it was about as new as ME was compared to 98SE.
Vista is a whole new, from the ground up OS. We generally stay away from any new MS product for 3-6 months, and new OS mor that long PAST SP1. It's only real adoption rate is because people buying retail don't have a choice. Eventually (like mine) IT departments start being forced to deal with it.
There's still NOTHING in XP I can't also do in Visa, and typically faster on older hardware, except I can't play DX 10 games (yet) on XP and it doesn't support HDCP for HDTV output. Maybe Vista is a bit more secure (in and of itself) but with proper security software I've found XP to actually be more secure, more responsive, easier to use and manage, require less resources, and last longer between reformats (Vista machines in our environment are typically lasing 6-10 months between imaging cycles, but a lot of that is due to software flux, not really M$'s fault)
Fact is, my wife's notebook, a 2.5 year old AMD64 based Gateway with an ATI X700 GPU and 1GB of Ram run CIRCLES around my vista based HP machine with a core 2 Duo, 2GB, and a newer generation GPU. Our hard drives have the same specs, as do our screen resolutions and game settings. The HP should BLOW AWAY the older Gateway machine, but it's NOTICABLY slower! (and it does now that I found chipset drivers that allowed XP to be installed on it)
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I'll risk the "MS Apologist" brand as well.
Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it. My wife's system runs it just fine, and she loves it. The games she plays on it run fine, but it was a fairly high end system when she bought it, and isn't that bad at the moment. The only change she had to make in going to Vista was going from 1GB to 2GB of RAM.
My system, on the other hand, is falling to the bottom of the totem pole; and Vista is horrible on it. I can play most games on it with reasonable graphics settings, in XP. When I tried Vista on it, many of the games became unplayable at the exact same video settings. So, I'm back on XP (haven't installed SP3 yet).
In all, the biggest problem I see with Vista is that it does take up more resources, and is really meant for newer systems. If you have a good system, you can have all the flashy Vista interface. If you have a marginal system already, stick with the Crayola interface in XP.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
"Sure, Vista kinda sucks, but all Windows versions kinda suck."
I think all OS'es have a fair amount of suckage to them.
Interesting. I grew up using DOS/Windows and Unix/Linux and absolutely *hated* pre-OS X Mac for this very reason.
On the Mac, all kinds of stuff happened automagically in the background--but when it didn't work, you were screwed because there was not much you could do to fix the problem.
Then Microsoft started implementing brain-dead automagic into Windows, Apple released Mac OS X (based on BSD) and the tables turned.
After years of being a PC guy, I switched to Mac 3 years ago and couldn't be happier.
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000
Cleartype. If Windows 2000 had decent font smoothing I'd still be using it.
The domain does slow things alot since the startup loads alot of stuff on workstations, but still, even slower xp machines boot up in less than 10 minutes.
Something in that standard setup really breaks down vista, since that workstation isn't the only vista machine suffering from the same symptoms.
Most problems witnessed seem to relate to symantec, office 2007 and sql server.
Either would randomly freeze and turn the system inoperable.
The system reliability monitor kept running around 5-7 days uptime before sp1, after installing sp1 the number fell below 3.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
How is Vista more secure? Training people to click Confirm all day long doesn't make a system more secure.
Does Vista still allow Remote Registry editing by hackers over the internet? Does Vista still have ActiveX? Does Vista still allow people to remotely run processes under a different user's credentials?
Vista also released a huge security vulnerability into the wild that can never be taken back. Insert a Vista install DVD into a computer and boot into it. With the recovery console you can have full access to a system's hard drive without administrator password now.
I know you can do the same with a Knoppix CD, but now the exploit is something more visible to the average user.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yes, obviously they do. The technologies in Vista are key to their leveraging their desktop monopoly into other areas like entertainment.
However -- this is NOT the way they want to do it. Especially now.
Microsoft is a big picture, global strategy kind of outfit, and right now several of the underpinnings of their grand strategy appear cracked.
IE, while still the dominant browser, has lost significant market share for the last four years running. MS is a perennial nobody in online services, something the Yahoo acquisition was supposed to fix. They'll be back, but with every month their ability to execute a dramatic turnaround using their browser and desktop monopoly drops. While arguably the office monopoly is more important than the desktop monopoly, the desktop monopoly is the fulcrum and DRM is the lever by which they hope to become the dominant player in digital entertainment. That's why they aren't hot and bothered about Blu-ray; they don't envision a future where people access information by any old third party hardware.
Why was Vista such a dog, after they'd delivered two successive solid releases in the Windows franchise (2000 and XP)? Because they had too many agendas; too many strategic partners to keep happy. Vista is not architecturally worse than its predecessors, in some ways it is better. It's just unfinished; MS had too many strategic imperatives to satisfy, imperatives that were useless or meaningless to customers.
I think what we're seeing is a world of technology that is too complex and dynamic to be orchestrated by the strategic plans of any single company. But MS is a big picture, grand strategy kind of company. There's lots of valuable pieces in that company too.
The irony is we may look back in ten years time and conclude that MS shareholders would have been better if the anti-trust case had resulted in a court-ordered breakup. Since MS dodged the break-up bullet in 2001, its stock price has lagged the NASDAQ as a whole.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The funny thing is that I used to be that way and then crossed a point about four years ago where I could generally zero in and fix the problem. That did a lot to endear Linux and the other free Unixes to me. It is generally possible to recover from screw ups, even really bad ones, as long as the hardware is still OK.
/etc directory
These days I have a USB hard drive that contains:
A list of all installed packages.
A tarred up copy of the
Entire home directory. (which contains all installers for anything I didn't get from repositories as well)
Even if my hard drive were to completely eat it, those three things would get me my exact working environment back in an hour or two. Most of that time would be spent downloading the installer and packages. But, I have yet to have to resort to that. I've picked up enough of the way a Linux system hangs together that I can just fix the damn thing if it breaks usually.
Dont trust Vista's windows classic mode. If you run Visa in Windows classic mode many of the Adobe CS3 bundle applications will have problems. You will see screen update problems in Photoshop and Premiere. OpenGL warnings in Aftereffects and you won't be able to dump to tape using firewire from premiere on many systems.
Strange, that... I actually found that Vista ran noticeably faster than XP on a computer I was using as a media centre with your suggested settings. I was dully impressed, right up until Vista started randomly rebooting and throwing up BSoDs (which I personally have found to be few and far-between on XP).
IMHO, I think XP is the best thing they ever done did, and I thought that right from day one.
The first thing I did when I got my XP machine at work was to change the desktop theme to "Windows Classic", because I hated the Fisher-Price look. The first thing I did when my wife got her Vista laptop was to change the desktop theme to "Windows Classic", because it didn't have the horsepower for Aero.
The one thing that Vista does that constantly pisses me off is that "Shell Folders" in Explorer occasionally move around in the file system, even though they always show up in the same place in Explorer.
The other night she went to download a video from a web site, and clicked open instead of save by mistake, so after about 30 minutes of progress bar, the video starts playing in Media Player. I'm like, no problem, it's in TEMP, so I'll just copy it to the desktop before WMP closes. So I open a prompt (I'm a command line bigot, so sue me) and cd to the user directory to find Local Settings, and its not there anymore. This time its under Pictures, last time it was under Favorites, who knows where it will be next time.
I'm sure this is a defensive measure to give viruses and trojans a harder time finding the stuff that they scan for, but it pisses me off when need to actually accomplish something.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.