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.

Comments

One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

I have installed SP3 on several systems, and I have only had problems on one. It was my laptop, and I had known there were problems with the underlying Windows installation for months but wondered if SP3 might fix them. It did not. It ended up in an endless cycle of BSoDs from which it never did recover. I ghosted the drive, wiped it clean, and installed from an XP CD with SP3 slipstreamed. Now the laptop is running better than ever. I am not sure if SP3 has anything to do with that, or the fact that it's a fresh install with new, recent drivers. (most likely the clean install.)

The BSoD/stop errors I received pointed to a driver issue with DEP, but without being able to boot even in safe mode there was no easy way to debug the problem. I could have tried a repair install, but I felt more comfortable starting from scratch.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[tgatliff]

I agree...

Also, a bright way to look at this is that Vista is creating allot more havoc everyday that SP3 could ever generate in its entire rollout... :)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blahbooboo3]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ppz003]

Windows service packs have never helped broken systems. They have only made them worse. See exhibits SP1 and SP2.

If you suspect the SP won't take, just go straight to slipstream, wipe, and reinstall.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that that the case with most operating systems?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

I figured it was worth a shot, and I had good backups ready anyhow.

I still have the ghosted drive if I ever get curious and want to really figure out what the problem was.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[MightyYar]

Ahhh, I'm having dreamy flashbacks to the old Mac System 7 days, when you just replaced the "System" file - or worst case renamed the "System Folder" and replaced it with a fresh one.

But what's that? A bomb icon? Extensions conflicts? Co-operative multitasking... networking and printing from the... Chooser? Ahhhhhh!

Maybe the more complicated install is worth it after all :) I'm just a bit nostalgic from knowing what every single file did on my PC... DOS was good like that, too.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Trashman]

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. Don't blame the Industry, Blame the product.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Embolism]

Same here. I just upgraded a laptop last night for total of five systems. All were pain free.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Enry]

I'm actually going through this process now and can answer your question.

I went to install XP SP3 in VMWare and I hosed the image while it was updating, rendering the underlying OS completely useless. The only way I could coax it back to life was to reinstall the OS over the old one, and even that didn't work. I'm now spending way too much of this morning creating a new image and reinstalling everything from scratch. I don't use XP for much, so I didn't really lose anything in the process.

But compare this to most Linux distributions. If there was a failure of one part (e-mail, SSH, even the kernel), you only need to repair or fix that one piece and you're back and running again and that repair can be done independently of other parts of the system. I'd wager the only time you'd need to wipe a Linux disk and start from scratch is if you've been pwn3d and the binaries have been replaced with trojans. In the case of Windows, it's hard to track down the actual cause of a problem, and even then replace whatever configuration or binaries were corrupted. Given the time and searching involved to do so, it's easier to wipe the disk and start over.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[harry666t]

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: decent operating systems don't even have to reboot.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[mgblst]

Yes, but the industry is built around that soory excuse for an OS, when it would be a lot better of if it had gone with something else.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blahbooboo3]

I have never been able to get a repair to work correctly -- though I am not a OS administrator. Every single time I have tried with ALL the Windows products (going back to 3.1) the repair would not work properly. In the end, format and fresh install always, in my experience, took less time and had a higher probability of making things work correcctly.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[JediTrainer]

Look, I'm a Linux fan too, but this isn't a problem necessarily with Windows alone. I have certainly dealt with my fair share of Gentoo, RedHat, Fedora distros that cacked up the big one after an upgrade. Sometimes a reinstall is just easier than trying to figure out what broke, especially on a non-critical machine.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I do think the unbridled hate that pervades /.'s reaction to every single Windows article is a bit out of hand. Maybe this will help stem the tide of Vista-bashing. Sure, Vista kinda sucks, but all Windows versions kinda suck. I think most people who are ripping on Vista for being the operating system anti-christ are forgetting how badly XP sucked pre-SP1, and even pre-SP2. 7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention. Vista's maturing, and as it does it'll become a better operating system, and everyone will benefit, even if they don't use Vista. Microsoft still competes largely on the basis of being a de facto standard. Vista's release has caused them to lose this edge somewhat, and the window has opened for their competition, who compete mostly on features, to get a little lazy (Leopard, anyone?). Microsoft competing more vigorously on their stale plank, assuming they don't magically find traction they've been unable to find for years, can't do anything but help the products on the market. Okay, now it's time to cue the million responses calling me a Microsoft shill. Suggested topics: "There really was no reason to upgrade from 2k to XP, I still use 2k just fine," "Vista is beyond repair because of DRM," and "Vista is way more broken than Leopard, how dare you rip on OS X."

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[superpulpsicle]

M$ is teaching the industry a dirty capitalist lesson of how to wipe out old inventory, in this case XP SP3 purposely handicapped vista. Next time you bring your car to get an oil change, the mechanics will blowup the engine and offer you a new car.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SatanicPuppy]

It's still possible to fubar Linux or Unix or OSX. One advantage that you DO have is that it is possible to do a "real" restore from a working backup...On the other hand, most people are sloppy with backups for their personal machines.

If you do a good job of screwing the system, it still can be quicker to start from scratch. Whenever I have a huge upgrade on a development machine, I tend to start from scratch, to hopefully avoid the problems that accumulate over time.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[GaryOlson]

The dominant OS in the world easiest way to fix is by re-installing!! Just seems weird...

Why, YES, with a proper network install server, install configuration, binary server, and network mounted home directories, Linux is much easier to reinstall than repair. The same can be said for Windows (XP or newer), Solaris, and many *nix systems. I can fix a system during lunch and a meeting.

Locally stored user data and locally installed applications is a completely different item. This is subject to the speed and availability of the backup system.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Lumpy]

It started with WFW3.11 the easiest solution was to simplt wipe the install and re-install. The TCP/IP stack would get wonky at time as well and a reinstall would fix it.

When it came to Microsoft Windows, it has ALWAYS been "reinstall it"

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[acechase]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

The reason it's so difficult to fix a windows system is because you are encouraged to not understand it. With a more open system you can learn where the system files are that get edited and replace any that begin to cause problems. With Windows however you even try to learn about more complex parts of the system like the registry you are greeted with one page messages telling you "It's important. Don't touch it." I know I sound like a open source zealot but it's stuff like this that has made people like me go from not caring either way to pro open source.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sancho]

It was VMWare? Why the hell didn't you take a snapshot before performing this major OS update?

If there was a failure of one part (e-mail, SSH, even the kernel), you only need to repair or fix that one piece and you're back and running again and that repair can be done independently of other parts of the system. Guess you've never suffered through a botched libc update.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[TriZz]

But with all of the delays of Vista they could have made it more stable before they released it. I think that's the problem with Microsoft is that they release everything before it's ready. I, personally, am an OS X user simply because I fix Windows machines all day, and don't want to go home and look at Windows. I do have XP SP3 on my MBP (boot camp/parallels) and have no issue with SP3 My problems with Vista have been minimal. The fact that it took 10 minutes to move even a small file from one location to the next was my only complaint at first. After SP1, it's been much better. I agree with a lot of what you say...given time, they'll fix more things making it more stable...but they definitely should have known about A LOT of the bugs before it was released.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[pohl]

Sure, Vista kinda sucks, but all Windows versions kinda suck.

I'm not sure I see how your post qualifies as less of a microsoft-bashing post than the one you were responding to. Why must you say such negative things about the products of a poor, defenseless, beleaguered little 800lb gorilla!?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sobrique]

I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it. I've had quite a few varying degrees of 'fubar' but invariably the problem's I've had have either been fixed by software (in most cases, not even needing a reboot) or have been a hardware fault (which in some case _have_ needed to take the system down).

The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.

*shrug*. You _can_ get utterly hosed on either, but Solaris is still better at keeping entropy at bay.

Although I _have_ done a 'wipe and restart' on a shared filesystem though on a few occasions, where whole departments have denied responsibility a massive dogpile of disorganised data. A 'restructure and clean' (tell 'em it's being ugpraded) works well for making them figure out what they actually need to keep/need backed up/are willing to pay for, and what they're not :)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[justthinkit]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[neoform]

I haven't had to do a clean reinstall on any of my macs since OS 9..

I can't tell you how many times I've had to reinstall windows on my PCs.. I've completely lost count.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[msuarezalvarez]

Hmm. Why?

Anyone is free to offer whatever product they want, even as inadequate as Windows. The industry, on the other hand, could have been more selective.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SeeManRun]

I don't find this comment insightful. Why should regular users need to understand their computer? It is a tool and it shouldn't matter how it works, as long as it works. Imagine if you had to be a mechanic to drive a car, or an electrician to watch a TV. We geeks seem to forget lay people don't want to know what a memory leak is, and shouldn't have to know. The exact problem with Linux is that you are forced to know more about how it works than you are with Windows, which is what many people don't want. Unfortunately, knowing more about the machine always makes for a better experience.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Enry]

It was VMWare? Why the hell didn't you take a snapshot before performing this major OS update? Meh.

Guess you've never suffered through a botched libc update. Ohhhh yes I did. Back in the days when where were no live CDs. Then, you were kinda stuck with a reinstall, but that was about 12 years ago since that last happend. I've been able to fix a lot of problems easily with a live CD under Linux including things like corrupted MBRs.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Colonel Korn]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[vandit2k6]

Your point is definitely valid. However, if you're going to sit here and tell me that you would open up and start walking through Linux kernel rather then doing a few googling about the problem you're facing with Windows than I am going to go ahead and call you a masochist. Or no I will just say you have a lot of time on your hands. That's just my 2 cents.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Knuckles]

He didn't say that regular users should need to understand their computers, but that there should be the option to understand them. To apply your analogy, what would car users think if rebuilding the whole car was the only way to fix issues even for a mechanic?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[rvw]

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. After installing SP3 on my work desktop (using the download), I couldn't login anymore. I got a black screen, the monitor stayed alive. I could go back using system recovery. After the first time going back I lost my remote desktop client, so I couldn't login to other systems anymore. Furthermore I lost my CD drive. I tried another time via Windows Update (which was only 60MB instead of the 323MB of the download), but had the same problem. I did another system recovery, going back a month now, and now everything works, although I had to reinstall several programs.

Still I have to do a complete reinstall if I want to get this SP working I'm afraid...

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[InfinityWpi]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sancho]

Most Linux problems these days are prevented through quality control and the fact that distributions act as a "vendor" so that problems with libraries don't happen. So yeah, nowadays, the dreaded libc problem are less common, and even if they do bork your system, there are easy ways to repair it.

On the other hand, re-installing is highly simplified, too. And since data can easily live on a separate partition, I actually think that reinstalling is faster and easier than repairing libraries, even with a Live CD.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Jaysyn]

Funny, everytime I screwed up a Linux box while learning how to use it, I fixed it the same way. Format & reinstall.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SithGod]

He's not saying that regular users should need to fully understand how an OS works, only that people who want to know how it works should be able to. This would be akin to GM saying "Don't bother trying to fix your transmission, just buy a new car" (Yes, I know not quite the same, but close enough). Does the average car driver know how to fix their car, no. But if one had the desire to learn how to, they could. In that same way, those of us who want to learn how to fix a Windows install instead of simply reinstalling would like the oppertunity to be able to do so.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Jaysyn]

But compare this to most Linux distributions. If there was a failure of one part (e-mail, SSH, even the kernel), you only need to repair or fix that one piece and you're back and running again and that repair can be done independently of other parts of the system. Sure, if you are intimately familiar with it. The same is basically true for Windows. Most people just aren't that familiar with either O/S.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find this comment insightful. Why should regular users need to understand their computer? It is a tool and it shouldn't matter how it works, as long as it works. Imagine if you had to be a mechanic to drive a car, or an electrician to watch a TV.

Not sure what you're rambling on about here. He said the reason it's so difficult to fix a windows system, not run it. This comment thread is discussing the absurdity that even for someone who knows how to fix a computer, Windows makes it too difficult.

To use your analogy, imagine if you took your car to a mechanic because the head gasket was leaking and he said "sorry, your problem is in the engine, and I can't open it up to fix it. You'll have to just get a new engine."

The fact that, in this case, the user of the computer is also the person trying to fix it when it's broken is irrelevant.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Archangel Michael]

Its faster for me, in my work. While the total time for the machine to be out of commission, it might not be "faster", but in terms of my time, a reload is infinitely faster.

I use Windows Deployment Services (formerly RIS) to re-image a machine. It takes less than two minutes of my time to re-image a machine and get to a usable desktop. Total time for re-image is about two hours for all the software to reload (all automatic), and get the user back to work.

I don't worry about drivers (thanks Driver Packs!), loading Office (MS or Open!), Acrobat Reader ....(Thanks MS and AD!) because it is all automatic now.

Computer slow? A couple of F12 and username / password and I walk away, knowing that in two hours, my systems are back exactly where they should be.

AND, it loads faster than CD. MUCH faster.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[JDWTopGuy]

That's a valid point, but unfortunately I think it applies just as much to any modern operating system. If I screw up my install of Mac OS X, I don't think it would be an easy thing to fix it without reinstalling. In fact, I've had to reinstall once or twice. Now, other operating systems *may* be more resilient, but in the end I would say that basically every modern desktop OS has grown far too complicated to restore easily.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[TheHorse13]

Glad you had a nice experience. I, however, did not. Turns out that XP SP3 looks for the Beethoven.mp3 sample file on your host and if it's not there, PRESTO, instant nag screen and no SP3 upgrade. Excellent QA Microsoft.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Idbar]

Problem is, you don't pay for open source. When you pay for something, and there's people behind, waiting for the right time to sue, then you have to label stuff in such way: "If you touch it, you may break it, so you better leave it alone". It amazes me that plastic bags have to come with a disclaimer because you can kill your self with them, and I bet that if someone got killed, they didn't know how to read anyways. That is, if you don't read the "readme" file and click every single "ok" without even looking what you're doing, well, don't expect that everything will go smoothly.

Although I know /. is full of gurus that know everything about computer, I for one, believe that not everyone has to. Even though I know is important, I can't complain if my dad or my mom don't fully understand what the OS does for them, and I won't expect them to go mess with the /etc files either. And I don't expect them to read a confusing literature as the one provided in some manuals.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[matang]

it became acceptable not because the issues can't be fixed otherwise, but often because the fix requires 20 steps and several hours of time. we have our users' profiles backed up and have an sms image ready to roll whenever there's a major issue. our users are encouraged to back up their personal files, etc as they see fit. it probably take 20 minutes to re-image a machine and another ten to put their profile back on. if it's some obscure error that take an hour of research to figure out and another hour or two to get rolling it's waaaaay faster to re-image the machine. just my 2 cents.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[fwarren]

As I said, I felt more comfortable starting from scratch and going that route

I install, patch, update, activate, etc. Then use something like the systemrescue CD or slax to run partimage and make a snapshot of the OS.

That way recovery is 1) Make note of any apps that may have been installed since I snapshoted the system. 2) backup documents 3) backup interesting titbits of my profile 4) reimage machine 5) Put my documents and profile back 6) Install missing software.

Since I snsapshot it the same day I did the install, driver update and installed all software. The system is clean enough to respond well to a service pack. Not that there has been the need for that for the last 4 years.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[petermgreen]

Not so long ago I set up fedora (not my preffered linux distro) to test some things on. Due to some repositry related problems I inadvertantly ended up removing most of the desktop stuff.

I reinstalled X gnome and gdm. I could start X manually using startx but gdm just refused to work and gave no usefull indication that I could find as to why.

I have had similar problems with mail systems in the past.

Granted such problems are rarer on linux than on windows but they do still happen.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Jellybob]

Most of the time you will indeed Google it, but very occasionally you might have to go and mess with the kernel source to fix a problem.

We had a server here that was suffering from memory leaks that would take it down every few days - thanks to the kernel being open source, it was possible to track down the modification that was causing the problem, and fix it.

There's not a chance we could do that with a Windows machine, and that's despite being a "Gold Partner" with a direct line to Redmond.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[filthpickle]

First off, you shouldn't have posted this as AC. Aside from that, I totally agree with you.

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 /.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.

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[mweather]

XP was an improvement over the previous Windows version. Vista is not.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Tom]

On the other hand, most people are sloppy with backups for their personal machines. Which is why Apple did a great thing with Time Machine. That's exactly the kind of stuff you need for home users: A total nobrainer, invisible, transparent, automatic. And it allows you to restore only the one file you need, not do a full rollback.

The problem is that MS has stopped thinking about "advantage for the user" at least 10 years ago.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[mweather]

Sure it's possible, but it's extremely difficult without root access. The worst you're likely to do is screw up your user.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SatanicPuppy]

Actually, I agree with regards to Solaris...One of the nice things about proprietary solaris is the patch lines are utterly clear, and you can do insane rollbacks very easily...No screwing around with YUM or APT.

The thing that usually gets me in trouble with Linux is the convenience of the automatic update tools; it's very seductive, and very easy to do something stupid.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jZnat]

Windows Vista will continue to be bashed as is until Microsoft releases fixes a la Windows XP SP2 that actually stabilise the operating system in most cases, fixes many existing issues and annoyances, improves security (although, Vista is supposedly a lot more secure than XP et al.), and makes it an overall usable operating system. Some people still swear by Windows 2000 to this day, so I don't doubt that there will be people who will swear by Windows XP several years from now anyway.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

This being a laptop I don't have a lot of extra HD space for snapshots or on-disk backups. Docs get sync'd to a TrueCrypt volume on a flash drive. Pictures and music are copied to my server and my wife's PC by hand or with SyncToy. I also make regular backups to DVD of documents and such.

Mail is kept on an IMAP server, but I also backup local folders, bookmarks, etc periodically to a flash drive and to my server.

I'd rather take a day and make sure I have a fresh install using all new (or the most recent) drivers, software versions, etc.

It always seemed like when I used to use snapshots and ghost images, by the time I needed to revert, everything was horribly out of date and I spent just as much time trying to update everything as I would have on a fresh install. Maybe it's just me.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[DaveWick79]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Number6.2]

It's called the "Viet Nam" solution: in order to save that village, we had to destroy it!

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[wilder_card]

"It is a tool and it shouldn't matter how it works"

That's great in theory. Too bad it has nothing to do with the real world. Maybe if we stopped continuous upgrades of hardware and software, and spent a decade or two stabilizing and polishing the operating system and applications, we could get there. Won't happen.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[b0bby]

There are lots of cases where it's easier/cheaper to just replace something rather than try to fix it. Most consumer electronics come to mind. Similarly, if something looks like it could take a significant amount of time to troubleshoot, it's a rational choice to decide to reinstall, since you know that it'll only take a few hours and the results are likely to be good.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

That sounds like a wonderful setup for a corporate environment. I'd love to have everything that automated.

At work I only have 5-6 Windows PCs and no Windows Servers (But there are close to 20 FreeBSD and Linux servers). At home I have two Windows PCs and a FreeBSD server. When repairing customer PCs, they only talk to a single FreeBSD server with Samba to pull utils/updates/etc from network shares.

I do like periodically building up-to-date XP install discs. I had been using RyanVM's integrator, but I have not been keeping up to date with that lately, as I have been sticking with stock SP2 images. Now I'll probably go with SP3.

It seems like along with the updates, both RyanVM and nLite both tend to install lots of other apps and tweaks that not all customers appreciate.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SupRspi]

Your argument is sound, but your conclusion sort of counters it. It's still true though, it's just the way it is. I compare it to my motorcycle. I can ride it, but I'm not a mechanic. However, every time I take the time to learn something new about it's operation or repair I find my whole riding experience improves. This is the problem with the different flavours of Linux in my mind - you are encouraged/forced to learn about how it works - it isn't simply provided as a tool that will work. It's the reason I want my mom to have a Mac. I'd rather she get a "sad mac face" when there's an important problem and she can take it to get it fixed, rather than call me every day wondering how she edits such and such file to make something work.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[number6x]

I agree.

I use linux not Windows, but this is ridiculus!

WinXP sp3 is causing hundreds of complaints?

HUNDREDS?

How many millions of XP users were automatically upgraded to sp3?

Hundreds are complaining. That is a pretty good outcome.

There are plenty of things to bash MS about.

This seems like a non-issue to me.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

As you (and several others) have hit on; I don't expect the average Joe to do anything but do a fresh reinstall, For any OS. On a personal and professional level (I'm a programmer)however when I am faced with any system that discourages the ability for someone to learn more about it I am quite annoyed. Linux, with all it's bugs and driver support problems, is more usable then Windows for me just because I stand a chance of being able to fix it when something gos wrong.

As a side note due to WGA all it's copy protection the analogy for Windows is more "Your car broke down? Time to buy a new car." Look at some average Joe users and you'll see this is just what they do. The computer in there house is just used to surf the web and look at the occasional word doc but they still need to buy a new PC every few years.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SithGod]

I agree with you on that. I'm not arguing the relative merits of either method, half the time I'd just go ahead and reload my machine anyways. I'm simply saying that we as consumers should be given the option of deciding which is the better course of action.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arth1]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Stanislav_J]

Some people still swear at Windows 2000 to this day, so I don't doubt that there will be people who will swear at Windows XP several years from now anyway.

There....fixed those typos for ya.....

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[apt-get moo]

He didn't say that regular users should need to understand their computers, but that there should be the option to understand them. To apply your analogy, what would car users think if rebuilding the whole car was the only way to fix issues even for a mechanic? There has to be a car anology?
Car makers would probably cherish that drivers could as well buy a new car. Okay, I guess some of them would protest, but buing a new one is exactly the way we deal with broken washing machines, kitchen equipment as well as most stuff which would cost something below 50 bucks.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[NotBornYesterday]

Huh? Who modded the AC GP +5 and the parent flamebait? Harry's right.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I think most people who are ripping on Vista for being the operating system anti-christ are forgetting how badly XP sucked pre-SP1, and even pre-SP2. 7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention.

Suggested topics: "There really was no reason to upgrade from 2k to XP, I still use 2k just fine,"

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.)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[incripshin]

I whole-heartedly agree. I don't use Vista as I'm more of a UNIX guy, and because I don't expect my slew of special laptop drivers to install cleanly in Vista. But as a computer science graduate and a UNIX user who cares a lot about operating system design, I think Vista is a huge step up. I always hated the security of XP. It's hardware requirements are too steep, though, and it isn't as stable as XP. Most of the complaints I hear, though, are minor quibbles and resistance to the very features that make the OS secure. People still don't realize that running as root is a very bad idea. The rabble doesn't care about the operating system, though.

Anyway, you can mod me down now, you elitists. Everybody else does.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nevesis]

You're right in the similarities between XP and Vista in that they were both more bloated than their predecessors and that many users were reluctant to "upgrade" because of that. But there are some big differences.

XP was considered bloat and XP doubled the minimum requirements from 2000 Pro.

Vista quadruples the minimum XP processing requirement, octuples XP minimum RAM, decuples the minimum HDD free space, and adds a new requirement for video cards.

On top of all of that, XP and 2000 were essentially the same kernel. There weren't many compatibility issues, and users weren't faced with drastic UI changes.

So, was XP twice as "good" as 2000? Maybe, so people switched. Is Vista ten times as "good" as XP? Plus IT support costs? No, so people aren't switching.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

You can fix a botched libc update most of the time.

I botched mine on Gentoo, and it was quite easily fixed.

First I used the installation CD to boot the system, then I started recompiling libc and probably it's dependencies. Three hours later I installed Debian. Problem solved!

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[theshowmecanuck]

So how does having a relatively very small percentage of the population with the time, energy, and ability to understand how the operating works, help the vast majority who don't have the time, energy, or ability who will need to re-install their O/S regardless. Some people just want to use a tool not build or fix it. You don't expect someone who strips the gears on a socket wrench to know how to smelt iron and make steel and mold and machine it into a new wrench do you? Why do you expect the average user to do the equivalent with software when their O/S tool breaks?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nairbv]

umm.... who ever said XP was worse than 2000? I seem to have missed that.

I never used 2000, but I seem to remember people saying it sucked too. xp wasn't so bad, and I don't remember ever hearing anyone say it was worse than 2000. 95 and 98 weren't terrible. really. vista sucks.

after vista, and the failed yahoo deal, ... I'm hearing some news sites suggesting that balmer could even get fired. people bitching about vista aren't imagining things. vista was a failure.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[mrchaotica]

I really prefer 2000 over XP even now. But I tend to use XP, because of particular needs: my laptop is a Tablet PC; there's no "Win2k tablet edition." My desktop is shared with my girlfriend; 2000 doesn't have fast user switching. It really sucks, because I'm morally opposed to activation.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Keruo]

Vista is bashed for a reason!

I had vista on my work laptop for 6 months, I kept hoping that SP1 would fix everything.. after installing it.. I downgraded to XP.

The result?

Battery life went from 1h 40min to 2h 30minutes.
The system now boots to usable state in 3 minutes. With vista, it took 28 minutes to actually get to login screen. After logging in it took another 5 minutes to actually do anything.
I don't have constant UAC annoyance (yes I know that can be turned off, but it was touted to be one of the good new features)
I can actually use 3 legacy corporate programs we need daily which didn't run on vista.

You might assume the laptop was old, but no. It's brand new! Yet my home laptop 4 years old running XP felt 3x faster than the new dual core machine with 3gb memory!

Under the line:
I can get more work done therefore costing less to my employer!

As for w2k, we still run it on few computers. Why upgrade since it works flawlessly and those machines aren't connected to public network.

I don't see any reason for vista deployment. It's like Windows ME all over again.
Only good thing with vista is downgrade right to xp from business and ultimate.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[GanjaManja]

I Agree, I can't believe that Windoze user have, for years now, become completely accustomed to erasing their entire hard drive to fix a problem! In fact, that's a typical way to speed up your computer! I'm not in IT or CS, and I've watched CS majors/engineers do this as their standard solution for their windoze PC, it's totally retarded. Even a person with an in-depth knowledge of computers can't fix a buggy Windoze PC.

Even to fix a program that's acting wierdly, you have to uninstall the entire program and re-install it, losing everything in the process.

I know that Linux folk and Mac folk (like myself) can actually fix problems. I think the last time I wiped a startup drive was 6 years ago, within 4 days of buying the new computer (I figured I'd partition before I did more to it). And having use-accessible preference files usually lets one fix an unhappy application, as any mac person knows.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[aliquis]

Was this before or after OS X? During DOS times or later? I don't know how MacOS classic was but shouldn't OS X be easier to understand than Win2k and later? I can see how DOS may have offered more transparency thought.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[kc2keo]

Repair installs seem to work fine for me. Sometimes some programs after the repair install needed to be installed again but for the most part it seems to run better retaining user settings. Although I agree that a fresh install is the best route. I like to have my OS behave in a way I like. I have to spend about 2 hours setting my desktop the way I want it to be. With Linux variants I get more control over things and I like that. If it was not for gaming and certain applications dependent on Windows I would be a full time Linux user. Wine has come a long way and so has Cedega but for the most part it does not cut it for me. I know I may of gone off topic somewhat but I had to get that thought out there...

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Phroggy]

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. Funny, one of the things I didn't like about PCs was not being able to tweak things as much. On the Mac, I had ResEdit.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Nahor]

I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it.[...]

The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.

So basically, you don't like Solaris' installer. You think it's so bad that it's better to fix the OS than to reinstall it. Am I right? ;)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sancho]

Oh, to be able to mod you +1 Funny. That actually made me laugh out loud.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[macslut]

I have to agree with you. I personally don't like much of what Microsoft has to offer. I certainly can't stand Windows, but a lot of the complaints about Vista *are* exactly like XP when it came out. Likewise we hear how ME was the worst ever from some people, and how 98 was the worst for others, and so on... The problem is that Microsoft is in a catch-22. You can't make a new OS without breaking some compatibility, introducing new bugs, and requiring the user to learn new things. The more they change Windows, the more pain they'll inherently introduce. The less they change Windows, the less worth it it'll be to upgrade. In this regard, Apple has the same problem, but it's a lot less of an issue because they control the hardware, there's smaller market share, and less software to worry about. This comment is sponsored by L' Chepeau Organic Tamari Soy Sauce

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Thalagyrt]

28 minutes? I've got three brand new machines running Vista and they take about 45 seconds tops from power on to login, that includes POST. Two are laptops, one's an extremely powerful audio workstation which takes about 20 seconds. You're either doing something extremely wrong, or you're lying about them being brand new and are trying to boot it up on a 486dx with 4 megs of RAM.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

Ah but you're missing the trick. In the Open source world if a hand full of people are having a problem it only takes the one masochist to solve it and post the fix on line. Why would he post the fix on line? Any number of reasons, but the 'why' does not matter it only matters that the fix is posted. Windows has the same masochists. They sit there and poke Windows until it bleeds and go 'look what I did!' But with out being able to see the code these very important masochists are crippled and can't gain the same level of information the Linux masochists can.

BlackViper(http://www.blackviper.com/) is one such Windows masochist. He has poked and prodded every windows service so he can figure out what to turn off for a faster PC.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Phroggy]

The difference is that Mac OS X has an "archive and install" option, which will preserve your home directory and a few other things like network settings while doing a clean install of the OS. All your data and preferences come out intact. A few applications that install "helper" bits and pieces might be broken, but for most people it's usually trivial problems that are easy to fix (worst case, reinstall the app).

Those of us who muck around with the UNIX side of things don't get off quite so easy, but it's still not too bad.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sandbags]

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)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jbohumil]

It's because PC operating systems we never designed for mission critical applications. Unlike mainframe operating systems where down time was unacceptable, PCs were luxury items that power users basically just dinked around with. Eventually abominations like MS Access caused leakage and end users started to imagine that PCs were suitable for production work. Unfortunately since they were never built with reliability in mind, being basically toys for power users, the result is the sad state of affairs we have.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sylver Dragon]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[thetoadwarrior]

I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I do think the unbridled hate that pervades /.'s reaction to every single Windows article is a bit out of hand. Yet your reply makes you sound like a complete tool by defending the world's richest company and one which has a monopoly. You seem to think it's acceptable that they have all this power yet release operating systems in a broken state. Your apologist views are the reason PC software sucks and why PC software is being held back because companies can just rely on shitty programmers to churn out border line code with the intention of fixing it later.

7 years ago, the chorus of "OH MY GOD XP IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN 2000! THERE'S NO NEED TO UPGRADE!" in every XP article's comments were eerily similar to the ones you hear now every time Vista gets a mention. XP's reception was much better than Vista's reception. Vista is definitely more in line with Windows ME but most MS apologists ignore this and just claim that Vista's respection is standard for all MS operating systems.

Secondly this whole "Vista is maturing" rubbish doesn't work. Vista is not a child, pet or a plant. It's not expected to grow. It should work out of the box.

Like I mentioned earlier, this mentality that it's acceptable to release a bit of software that costs hundreds of dollars in a broken state is why PC software in general sucks.

Console gaming was always superior to PC gaming in terms of quality because there wasn't any patching. They had to get it right. Where as PC game markets just had to get it sort of right. Now console gaming has the ability to patch games and, no surprise at all, the quality is dropping.

There is no reason software companies, especially one as large and as rich as Microsoft can't get it right on the first go.

Tell me this, are you willing to by a car, dvd player or microwave that only sort of works out of the box and the manufacturer promising to fix it at a later date? If not, then why is it acceptable for Microsoft to do this?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

You can pay for support. It's how RedHat and the other big *NIX people make all there money. I don't expect the average Joe to sit and learn how a computer works, or how a car works, or how the economy works, or how there house works...etc but making it easy to learn lowers the cost of your local (DEVICE NAME HERE) fix it guy. So next time mom's computer breaks the PC fix it guy might have learned about that kind of problem on his own and be able to fix it with out hitting mom for a Windows reinstall fee.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Achromatic1978]

Every time I go to solve a *NIX problem, then I get 12 answers of what might be causing that. Of those answers it is usually the case that at most one of them will fix my problem.

And nine of those will be along the lines of "RTFM, n00b!"

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[_xeno_]

Which is why Apple did a great thing with Time Machine. That's exactly the kind of stuff you need for home users: A total nobrainer, invisible, transparent, automatic. And it allows you to restore only the one file you need, not do a full rollback.

Vista has this feature, there's a tab called "Previous Versions" in the properties dialog for files and folders. Microsoft calls this feature Shadow Copy on the list of Vista features.

The problem is that MS has stopped thinking about "advantage for the user" at least 10 years ago.

Except that it's only available on the Ultimate and Business editions (footnote D as of the time I linked it). Home users don't get it.

But it's a great feature (despite the crappy slow and flaky UI), and one that should be available on all versions of Vista if Microsoft was intelligent and not trying to nickel-and-dime their customers. It's the only feature of Vista I've ever used that made me think "I'm glad I'm using Vista, I'd have been screwed in XP."

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arminw]

....lay people don't want to know what a memory leak is,.....

Indeed, isn't that when you call a plumber, when there is a leak? Of course I have memory leaks from time to time when it comes to remembering names. I wonder if a plumber can fix that?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Freeside1]

XP was an improvement over the previous Windows version. Vista is not. but it's pretty!

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

Nothing wrong with you. The learning curve for Linux is HUGE. At first I would do a reinstall at first sign my xorg.conf file was messed up. But now I can handle issues with it. It just takes time to learn the same tricks you know in Windows.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dotancohen]

You haven't typed about:config in the new Firefox betas, have you? You get a warning message, and have to click a button labeled "I'll be careful, I promise". Fucking annoying as hell, and makes me feel like I'm using a baby's toy.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dotancohen]

I don't know what the situation in your country is, but in Israel one must display basic mechanical knowledge to get a driver license. How to change a tire, what the radiator does, that kind of stuff. So, yes, I expect someone who is operating a complex piece of equipment (car, computer, nuclear submarine) to have a basic understanding of how it works.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[CastrTroy]

For your roommate, Try setting the theme to "Windows Classic". It will end up looking like Windows 2000, and will speed up the interface by about 100x. I have a Vista Laptop with Celeron 1.7 and 512 MB of RAM. Before windows classic theme, it was slow beyond usable. Not it runs quite respectable. Sure it won't look pretty like Vista is supposed to, but at least you'll be able to get stuff done.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[thetoadwarrior]

If you're not supposed to know how it works then shouldn't work straight away like say a DVD player or a new car?

With a car you have the option of fixing it yourself or paying a premium to have someone else fix it but when you buy it you get a guarantee and they'll fix it for free if it breaks within a certain period.

This isn't the case with software. The licence says they're responsible for nothing that their software breaks and even if they ship it broken it is your problem to pay out for and fix. So if we're going to use the car and TV analogy then software better work as good as a car or TV.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dotancohen]

Especially when a new version of the OS comes out every 6 months. When things get totally borked, I bittorrent the latest OS version and reinstall. Takes 20 minutes if /home is a seperate partition. I have a text file with everything I've ever apt-gotton (hehe), so I can run that as soon as I've reinstalled and poof! my new OS is configured with all my apps, and all my settings.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[amcdiarmid]

Oh, come one...

XP did suck pre sp1. The reason it sucked was not something the service pack fixed, but that the hardware caught up with the software: Between when XP was released, and when SP1 came out - processor speeds doubled. Ditto memory.

Vista likely runs fine an a $2000 desktop. Perhaps even a $1000 one. (I made a amd X2 6000 with 4 GB of memory for that.) However, a typical consumer unit is one your mother bought for $500 and thinks should be fine. If she waited a year or two to buy a vista computer: it would meet the real-world requirements.

mod down or reply: that is the question.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sandbags]

Actually, my firm's consulting contract explicitly states that is a problem can not be identified, including a resolution process, in less than 30 minutes, then we automatically re-image the customer's box. Any resolution that would involve more than 3 hours to fix also gets automatically reformatted. The only exception is resolutions specific to 3rd party applications (aka, when we're instructed to do a specific process by 3rd party support for some non-Microsoft App).

Even a single virus or spyware identified on a machine results in an immegiate reformat. You can remove the virus, but what files it may or may not have modified, leaving future security holes, or some user action that created the hole? Who's to know...

If you have proper images for your machines, a reformat should take about an hour, maybe 2 on a slower network. Adding a few missing apps via server rollout can be done as a background task.

Small offices? No images? No standardization? as we format systems perioducally we use a common image design, and ghost (or BareMetal Backup) the system.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[DarkOx]

I don't find this comment insightful. Why should regular users need to understand their radial arm saw? Its a tool and it shouldn't matter how it works, as long as it works. Imaging if you had to be a mechanic to drive a car or and electrician to watch TV. What geeks seem to forget lay people don't want to know what an out rip ism and shouldn't have to know. The exact problem with radial arms saws is that you are force to know more about how it works then your are with a hand saw, which is what many people don't want. Unfortunately, knowing more about the machine always makes for a better experience and more remaining fingers at the end of the day.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jollyreaper]

I don't find this comment insightful. Why should regular users need to understand their computer? It is a tool and it shouldn't matter how it works, as long as it works. Imagine if you had to be a mechanic to drive a car, or an electrician to watch a TV. We geeks seem to forget lay people don't want to know what a memory leak is, and shouldn't have to know. The exact problem with Linux is that you are forced to know more about how it works than you are with Windows, which is what many people don't want. Unfortunately, knowing more about the machine always makes for a better experience. I mostly agree with you. The problem comes about such as in a business when managers ignorant of the technical details make decisions that absolutely require an appreciation of the technical details or respect for the opinion and advice of the person you pay to understand the technical details. What happens when the executive needs to speak to law enforcement? Shut the fuck up, sir, and listen to your lawyer. All of his country club buddies would laugh him off the links if he said eh overruled his lawyer because he was talking in egghead legalese and he didn't like that.

When my dad worked fleet maintenance for the phone company, managers who didn't know anything about mechanics were telling him how to prioritize his tasks and which maintenance he could afford to defer. You can imagine how that story went.

Same shits happened in every company I've been in, people who know what they're doing (foremen, techies, accountants, etc) will tell the boss what needs to be done, boss will ignore the advice. It's worse for the techies because IT is a younger profession and there's less institutional tradition for management listening to the geeks. There's more acceptance for listening to the lawyers, they've been around longer and people are used to it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Doctor Faustus]

In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000?
As far as most users were concerned, Win98SE was the previous version of Windows.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sure, Vista kinda sucks, but all Windows versions kinda suck."

I think all OS'es have a fair amount of suckage to them.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[operagost]

The difference is that Vista really does suck.

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Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Mr_Magick]

The reason it's so difficult to fix a windows system is because you are encouraged to not understand it. This is exactly why I do clean installs when users have Windows problems. If it is not a problem that can be fixed in the first half hour then However, the problem is also exacerbated by malware. If I could go into msconfig and find all boot start programs, or even if I had to use msconfig and look in HKLM\...\run and find *all* programs that start on boot I would not have this problem. Microsoft, and malware writers, have done their best to hid all of the different areas in the file system to hide their programs. This on top of the fact that is sometimes difficult to Task Manager to track down memory hogging applications. Lately I have been using Process Explorer to find resource intense programs, but when Windows reports incorrect RAM usage to use Process Explorer... it just ends up easier for me to save off the users profile and reinstall from scratch.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[HiredMan]

Why is it the some of the biggest and most vigorous defenders of MS refuse to pay for software? I have run into this in real life several times where I get the 10 minute treatise defending Vista but when I bring up cost and the multiple versions I get, "Well, I never actually pay for it so that doesn't effect me." Is it that it seems like a much better system (and MS a better company) if you're getting it "for free" or is that a-holes who refuse to pay for software just have big mouths?

Has everyone else seen this or is it just me?

=tkk

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arminw]

.... 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. ....

With the low costs of portable storage devices, I keep one with a clean OS handy. If the internal system fails, the computer can be re-started from the external fire wire drive. If there is an internal drive software failure, the disk repair program will usually take care of the problem. If not, the user data can be copied from the internal to the external drive. Then a program such as Carbon Copy Cloner can be used to re-copy the external drive onto the internal one. The end result us a working computer with minimal effort. With time machine, Apple has made it simple to also keep backups on a network volume.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nmb3000]

Oh boy. I can understand people saying they prefer Win2000 over XP, or that they have no real need to upgrade (even 7 years after the fact!). The problem is when people are so blind or ignorant that they pretend/don't see the real improvements that XP (especially with 2 service packs) has over 2000.

In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000?

In a word? Multimedia. In more words? Security, GPO, native hardware support, support for newer versions of IE, Remote Desktop, etc. If you really don't see the myriad of ways XP improves on 2000 I'm not going to try and list them all. Besides, Wikpedia already has (more or less).

By artificially limiting the number of active connections?

Except that it doesn't. XP SP2 introduced a limit to the number of half-open connections you can have open at once. The limit (10 by default) is essentially never reached during normal use. Some poorly-configured Bittorrent clients can hit the ceiling, but it isn't that hard to disable the limit if you do a quick search.

By providing more bells and whistles slowing things down?

Yes, they improved the user interface. But by gosh, you can turn it off with a single checkbox!

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.

Better yet, they should have just released Service Pack 7 for Windows NT 4. After all, what improvements did Windows 2000 offer over NT4? This same discussion happens every time a new version of Windows is released. If you don't see any reason for you to upgrade, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that nobody else needs or wants to update.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[operagost]

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.

I don't think it's reasonable for a customer to expect those for free. Those are non-trivial features. There are also remote desktop/remote assistance, fast user switching, a user-friendly firewall, Cleartype, wireless support, and built-in zip folders.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

I've been running OS upgrades on the same PC since Windows 3.1 without ever having to reformat...

...then I upgraded to Vista and my house burned down.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ExHealthCareDewd]

I've had NO problems with SP3 on my box... I've spoken with several others about this... it seems the problems we associated with resident spyware and registry programs that prevented access to some areas... Problem wit SP3's a non-issue if you do it right... seems a lot of people are too quick to push the "gimme-it" button, without a bit of preperation.... Newbies...

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[mamer-retrogamer]

On my PC, compared to on my Macs, I was relatively encouraged to understand and tweak my system.

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sandbags]

It doesn't hurt that Apple's file backup is easy easy now, but more important is the core machine OS can be re-installed from what's basically an image DVD in less than 30 minuutes. Even if you upgraded from OS 10.3 or 10.4, you can use the 10.5 DVD to completely reset your machine. With XP or Vista, this is a minimum 1 hour process, if not 2 or 3 if you didn't have a slipstreamed OS disk. Also, since most Microsoft apps require a reboot after being installed, even in Vista, you've got several more hours of work to do. Apple doesn't have registry and permissions roadblocks, so once the machine is images from disk, TimeMachine completely restores the machine, pathces applications and all, all by itself... That's not possible In Microsoft's world without regular BareMetal or Ghost imaging seperate from the backups.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Poorcku]

I downloaded it on ITunes and never had any problems since.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Emperor Skull]

In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000

Cleartype. If Windows 2000 had decent font smoothing I'd still be using it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Enderandrew]

XP has a litany of standard features that 2000 doesn't, and it doesn't necessarily run any slower. A stock XP install does use a little more memory than 2000, but I've installed XP over 2000 and found that it ran faster in many cases.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Fred_A]

This is one of the (minor, admittedly) reasons that I stopped using Windows professionally although I have a partition that come and goes for games : because I just couldn't figure out how it worked or what it was doing.

So my professional and personal work is done in Unix/Linux (even my photography), and only games run in Windows since that can die or lose data without my caring about it.

I know that in theory, by buying books about the system, I could remedy to this sad state of affairs but I just stopped caring years ago. *shrug*

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arminw]

..basically every modern desktop OS has grown far too complicated to restore easily...

Just get an external firewire HD and make a bootable clone of your main HD when you first get your computer working, with all the programs you use installed. Such external boxes are not very expensive any more. Now when you've messed up your Mac, just boot from the firewire drive. Next copy any user data from the now accessible internal HD not already backed up elsewhere. Run the disk utility program to check and repair the integrity of the internal disk. Try to now reboot the computer the normal way. Many times it will be fine after that. If not, use a program such as Carbon Copy Cloner to clone you external HD back onto the internal drive.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Cairnarvon]

XP sucked mostly by mistake, so it was fixable. Vista sucks by design, so even if the bugs get worked out it will still be a worse OS.
Claiming Slashdot has an irrational hatred of Microsoft is very facile and for some reason seems to be a rather popular thing to do nowadays (there's generally at least three comments to that effect on every MS-related article), but have you ever stopped to think that maybe people have a real *reason* for their dislike?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Keruo]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Enderandrew]

We need a mod -1 Incorrect.

Please look up a few posts to see the litany of new features that XP provided. What you're saying simply isn't true.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[vandit2k6]

That is definitely legit. But you're really assuming a problem X has been solved already by someone. What do you do if the problem X has not been solved? Are you just going to be the masochist? Or will you wait for somebody to take that step?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blakey Rat]

I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it. I've had quite a few varying degrees of 'fubar' but invariably the problem's I've had have either been fixed by software (in most cases, not even needing a reboot) or have been a hardware fault (which in some case _have_ needed to take the system down).

The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.

Yeah, but you have to concede that may only say something about your own level of familiarity with the two products, and have absolutely nothing to do with how the products are actually constructed.

For instance, if I have a DNS problem in Solaris, I'd have no clue how to tackle and resolve it. But if I had the same problem in Windows, I'd type "ipconfig /flushdns" and more than likely the problem's solved.

Then a week later it comes up on Slashdot, and I write a post exactly like yours but the opposite. I was able to fix Windows much easier than reinstalling it, but that damned Solaris is so difficult I had to reinstall it! And of course that would apply regardless of what the product is; I'd always find the one I'm more familiar with easier to fix than reinstall, and the one I'm less familiar with harder to fix than reinstall.

In short, I don't find your argument compelling. At least, not without more information about your background.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[QRDeNameland]

I think all OS'es have a fair amount of suckage to them.

"Wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? Here it goes!"

Every OS Sucks

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arth1]

Except that it doesn't. XP SP2 introduced a limit to the number of half-open connections you can have open at once. The limit (10 by default) is essentially never reached during normal use. Some poorly-configured Bittorrent clients can hit the ceiling, but it isn't that hard to disable the limit if you do a quick search.

One word: Kademlia

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jkrise]

Microsoft even warns quite emphatically not to install service packs on a system that may have viruses, spyware, or any other system problems.

Microsoft always advertises its products as being easy to install, use and administer. A Service Pack, which is basically supposed to be a collection of bug fixes, must not break things like network drivers, antivirus software, browser dependencies etc. SP3 does all that and more.

XP is becoming very difficult to manage in large corporate networks. Win2K systems do not get these frequent updates, and keep chugging along peacefully. Looks like MS has gone out of its way to screw XP users, trying to make it as bad as Vista. Shame on the overpaid, bloated development teams.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arth1]

That's true, and is a sales argument, especially for laptops with their limited screen real estate.

However, I prefer a larger color gamut over sharpness, and thus use a high grade CRT, where subpixel font smoothing has no (positive) effect.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[filthpickle]

Why is it the some of the biggest and most vigorous defenders of MS refuse to pay for software? I don't know if you are referring to me, or it just made you think of it, but I am neither a big nor a vigorous defender of MS. Like I said in the post, I am just citing my experience with Vista.

I am, however, an asshole and I do have a big mouth after about 3 whisky and cokes so you were half right.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Khyber]

And when you just pick up a power saw and start using it, and you lop off those fingers because you don't understand it or how it works, you keep repeating what you just said while you rock back and forth, holding your bleeding stump.

People NEED to know how things work, or bad shit can happen. It doesn't matter if it's using a hammer, or a nail gun, or a computer loaded with software, if you don't know what you're doing, you can fuck something up.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[goarilla]

can you give me some pointers on how to do this ?
lately i've been thinking about this http://www.vernalex.com/guides/sysprep/introduction.shtml
but i just can't seem to find the ideal solution myself

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SanityInAnarchy]

Vista likely runs fine an a $2000 desktop. O RLY?

Try this: Disable indexing on your hard drive. Now open the start menu and start typing, as a search. Each character you type will spawn a new search in a background thread. Which means if you type "Hello, world!", you just spawned 13 separate threads, each of which is now crawling your entire hard drive.

Tell me that's not broken.

If she waited a year or two to buy a vista computer: it would meet the real-world requirements. And in a year or two, Vista might have a service pack that fixes retarded shit like the above.

Microsoft likes to alpha test on their customers. The only way out of it is to either not be a Microsoft customer, or to use a six year old OS. Meanwhile, I'll be over here using Ubuntu, which is pretty much mature and tested, and never more than six months old.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jonaskoelker]

Or, put briefly:

Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[networkBoy]

Rather than modding you (mostly because unless I can hand you both a Troll and an insightful at the same time I can't decide...)

The second to last point you brought up is valid.
Vista is broken because of DRM...
By design it fuzzes your video if not on HDCP compliant hardware and it detects media of a fairly broad type. I had a Vista box (Vista was more a byproduct of buying the machine) and was *unable* to do video editing because it decided that my video stream was too high a quality.

Now, of course Vista does meet it's design specs in this regard, so it is not defective, but it is broken.
-nB

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Thalagyrt]

You've got some bizarre machines/a bizarre setup. Active Directory takes a while to boot, but that's only on the servers in my experience.

*shrug*

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Almost-Retired]

Why should regular users need to understand their radial arm saw?

One of the dumber statements /. has accepted in recent history. Sheesh...

For exactly the same reason, safety. We have a tendency to call those who do not understand their tools by some moniker like "Lefty". I happen to own a radial arm saw, several power saws in fact, and I still, at 73, have all the attachments I was born with intact and mostly working, albeit pretty arthritic these days.

Those who ignore the basic warnings we preach cuz this site is a Kewl site, really do deserve to get the keyloggers and such installed on their toys, after all, there are hungry folks out there that really need your bank accounts passwords and such so they can eat tomorrow. And the moniker I apply to those folks? "Dumbass", or worse. And sympathy for when they do get cleaned out is in short supply even if I do have plenty of ammo to be used on the perps of such schemes.

Do I worry about it? Yes, thats why all my boxes run linux. Someday when we're a larger presence I expect the coders of such black hat stuff will start targeting linux too, but till then we're automaticly safer, and we tend to run more blockade and detection tools, like iptables than the M$ folks do. I had one of my kids hit me with satan's best tools a while back, and it never even made it to my logs. Satan was never able to determine if there was even a machine at my IP address. He does understand security, so I tapped his address with nmap, and he did have that XP box pretty well shuttered too.

--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
No one gets sick on Wednesdays.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[somersault]

When your OS has greater requirements than the games you play, you know something has gone very very wrong.. unless perhaps you only play the built in Windows games :p Sometimes life really is stranger than fiction..

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Moryath]

Better idea - why not just install Windows 2000 on the machine? It'll run great!

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[cbreaker]

I pretty much never have to re-install an operating system, because I know how they work.

I fix Windows, I fix Linux, I fix OSX. I've have extensive experience with all three, and almost never have I had to re-install. I troubleshoot the problems, and I fix them. Sometimes it takes a few google searches, but that's what I do, and next time, I can do it faster.

People re-install because they don't know how to fix their computers. Too many IT "professionals" do it because they're crappy at their jobs. They shouldn't be IT professionals if they can't fix a damned driver issue or a corrupt boot loader..

It's software. You can ALWAYS fix software problems.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Tweenk]

XP was different. I remember an article titled "The end of world is neigh, MS released good Windows" (it was in a Polish gaming magazine, so don't bother looking for it on the web). XP was the succesor to Windows 98, not windows 2000. It was much more stable, it supported a lot more hardware out-of-the-box than 2000 or 98 did (e.g wireless LAN cards), it had proper Unicode support (unlike 98), it was more user friendly, it was really better, and its hardware requirements were acceptable. Most exisitng and practically all new computers were able to run XP when it was released. On the other hand, Vista supports less harware, is less stable, less user friendly, has DRM which causes a catasrophic regression in DirectX sound quality (no harware sound processing, no EAX, NOTHING), is bloated beyond belief, even the basic version, and they completely fucked up Aero. They wanted the new interface to promote new DX10 cards, but by doing this they have given the finger to the early adopter. You not only needed the new Windows but also a new, very expensive graphics card, while the Linux crowd has been enjoying neater effects for a while on 5 year old hardware (I'm writing this from a TC1100 tablet PC which can run neat Compiz effects, and it has a Vista Experience Index of 1.0, though I usually have them turned off because they get in the way when CPU usage goes up, like when compiling).

Suggested topics: (...) "Vista is beyond repair because of DRM" Yes, it is. Look above for an example (no access to the sound hardware from DirectX).

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[hab136]

I was about to make almost exactly this comment (except add 2 years of using Linux in-between Windows and OS X), so instead I'll just say "me too".

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[cbreaker]

Your mentality is wrong. A computer is not just a tool, it's an all-purpose, versatile tool that has to be able to do anything the user wants.

A computer is NOT a toaster. A toaster makes toast. A computer does a lot more.

While no, a user shouldn't have to know what a memory leak is, but don't try to pass that type of problem off as Windows ONLY. I've had plenty of fuckup Mac apps that screwed up my mac systems pretty badly too.

While it sucks that Microsoft made some problems for some users with this update, shit is going to happen because of the nature of the thing.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[davinep]

The "unbridled hat the pervades /.'s reaction [to Microsoft]" might be stemmed somewhat if their releases were tested better before sent into the wild. Releasing updates advertised as service packs and/or critical that cause problems does not help Microsoft's products in the market. BTW, my XP SP3 update went without issue on a system with a recent, fresh, install of XP. IMHO, the whole thing is probably less of an issue on newer/cleaner installs than machines that have been running for some time.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[cbreaker]

While I believe that Windows is too complicated now a days, with the registry having become a mess of GUIDs and so much other nonsense, it's not impossible to learn it.

I've managed to stay on top of things, and I'm not a programmer. I can always fix something when it goes wrong.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[somersault]

Perhaps if they modded the GPL to require that you must charge $1000 to distribute any compiled apps, or $500 for the source, it would do better?

I have seen a lot of people who don't pay for software yep. They *know* that Windows isn't worth the money. They also know it's the only thing they can use if they want to play games.. one of my friends has been trying out OpenOffice at least, rather than just pirating MS Office! I gave one friend one of work's old desktops after I wiped it and installed Ubuntu. She tried XP, realised how slow it was, and flitted between Ubuntu/XP for a while. She then bought a Vista laptop and I think ended up installing XP on that too. I'm not sure what the moral of the story is, but we can all agree that Vista is not worth its weight in bird poo.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Keruo]

When you have environment with multiple domains and +2000 machines per domain, strange things tend to happen.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

Your new limiting point becomes how well known your software is. If it's not well known you need to solve it on your own because no one is gonna do it for you. If it is well known you can sit back and hope that A)It's not a critical issue for you and B)Other people who are bigger masochists then you will handle it.

However if you notice at this point you get no bonus from using closed source. You do get a potential bonus from using payed software(just remember Open source != free as in beer). In the end Open source is a bonus for you even if you never look at the code. I am not calling it a magic bullet and anyone who gos on line posting "It's open source. You figure it out!" is a basically a jerk, but open source only helps when solving problems.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[somersault]

Maybe he included the install time of a larger HD plus Vista? Though I can say it definitely is slower on startup/shutdown after seeing our MDs Vista laptop. It has better specs than mine, but runs like a dog. I always noticed Mac OS and Windows felt more sluggish to use than my 30Mhz Amiga. Sure there is slightly more going on with the interface (though not much, especially not anything that >2000 extra Mhz and accelerated graphics shouldn't take care of), but it's a joke that all modern user interfaces aren't lightning quick (not talking about browsing files, just rendering displays). Windows XP windows also flicker when you move them around quickly.. they should use double buffering just to make the whole thing feel more 'solid'

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[somersault]

Internet Explorer 7 won't install on 2000. Surely that's just another plus?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[domatic]

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.

These days I have a USB hard drive that contains:

A list of all installed packages.
A tarred up copy of the /etc directory
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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ConceptJunkie]

Maybe the complaints are the same, but the user experience isn't. I didn't get XP until I bought a laptop with it installed. It was a bit of a hassle getting used to it, but I did, and didn't notice a performance issue. I never felt like I needed to go back to Windows 2000.

I didn't buy Vista until I bought a laptop with it installed (and was well within specs to run Vista reasonably). It was a huge hassle getting used to it, and noticed a huge performance difference. After a couple months, I got tired of dealing with it, went back to XP (and had to buy a copy to do so, but it was worth it) and haven't thought about it since. (e.g., The seven minute boot after installing one little update was a camel-back-breaking event. Even normally boots took about 3 times longer than XP.) And to top it all off, I didn't think Aero was all that. It wasn't as ass-ugly as the default XP theme, but all those animations got monotonous and even annoying and the color scheme was pretty awful IMO. On Windows, nothing beats the Windows 2000 look, IMO.

Vista offers exactly zero features that I care about, but demands an enormous penalty. On the other hand, XP offered several features that made it an improvement over 2000 (Explorer being significantly less horrible for instance, much better USB, wireless and laptop support, as well) for my use.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[cp.tar]

Although I know /. is full of gurus that know everything about computer, I for one, believe that not everyone has to. Even though I know is important, I can't complain if my dad or my mom don't fully understand what the OS does for them, and I won't expect them to go mess with the /etc files either. And I don't expect them to read a confusing literature as the one provided in some manuals.

A computer is a bit more complex than, say, a car. Yet we systematically educate people who want to drive, but not the people who want to use a computer.

Yes, a computer is just a tool. But it is not a mere hammer.

I gave my father both Windows and Linux. That forced him to learn.
He'd started from scratch; now I have to find some time to teach him some database stuff.
I must say I'm quite proud of him.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[stupidflanders]

Agreed. Time-to-live boot: 45 seconds. I have a Centrino Duo w/ 2GB RAM.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[AmaDaden]

Kudos on keeping up with the registry (I mean that too. I know how hard it is) But your not a regular Joe. Knowing what the registry is alone elevates you to power user. I never said Windows can't be learned just that it's harder then learning the same amount in *NUX. It's not easy to read but *NUX has guide maps and documentation galore. I've only seen one set of books on the Windows registry and don't think they made it up to XP.

I know allot about Windows but one day I got stuck. I ran out of things to read so I just could not learn any more. I still had problems but there were no places I could go to learn about what caused them. THAT is why I switched to Linux. I was not done learning but Windows was done teaching. I did not want to spend my days poking Windows to learn it's secretes while I could just switch to Linux and keep reading.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SHaFT7]

not so much active directory, but exchange itself is what makes a server take forever. brand new 5300 series xeon, 4gb....12sec from the end of the raid post to login screen (this is the dc) same machine with exchange loaded up, 1min. lets not even talk about shutdown times, which is like 23525 times longer with exchange :)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[pionzypher]

So how does having a relatively very small percentage of the population with the time, energy, and ability to understand how the operating works, help the vast majority who don't have the time, energy, or ability who will need to re-install their O/S regardless.

Most of those people you are referencing bring the machine to someone knowledgeable to try to recover their "stuff" and to reinstall. I.E. the people who are likely to be interested in knowing how to fix it.

Jebus man, think! If it's easier to fix a comp than a full reinstall, that saves me hours of making sure I've recovered everything they want from the drive, reinstalling the os, patching, apps, app updates, copy said data back over. They pay me less money, I fix them in less time.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Macthorpe]

Does Vista still allow Remote Registry editing by hackers over the internet? Only with the admin password, and seeing as no user runs as full admin now that's a social engineering issue, same as on Linux.

Does Vista still have ActiveX? Yes, but with restricted permissions that doesn't allow it to make system modifications.

Does Vista still allow people to remotely run processes under a different user's credentials? Once again, only as admin. If somebody knows of an exploit available for Vista that allows privilege escalation then please let me know, as I'm not aware of one.

Vista also released a huge security vulnerability

I know you can do the same with a Knoppix CD So Linux Live CDs are huge security vulnerabilities waiting to happen? Nice to know.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Nullav]

Except that it doesn't. XP SP2 introduced a limit to the number of half-open connections you can have open at once. The limit (10 by default) is essentially never reached during normal use. Some poorly-configured Bittorrent clients can hit the ceiling, but it isn't that hard to disable the limit if you do a quick search.

That limit did absolutely nothing to help, in any case. I suppose it would be nice of me to link to the patch, now that SP3 has reset the limit.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[IntlHarvester]

I dunno, if you could buy a new engine for a hundred bucks, they would just reinstall it rather than rebuilding it. Any repair that takes longer than a couple hours is uneconomic when a decent Dell is $500.

Also I have a feeling that these people who claim to "know computers" are actually mouse jockeys who have not RTFMed (resource kits) or have any real idea how windows works under the hood. The typical tech seems to know nothing beyond run anti-spyware and defrag.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[tushar]

No one minds reinstalling for newer releases. The OP is taking about having to reinstall the same version over and over again. I don't mind starting for scratch for Windows XP -> Windows Vista upgrade. But having to reinstall just Windows XP every year just to clear all the crap it has accumulated over the year is ridiculous.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Timothy Chu]

There is no reason software companies, especially one as large and as rich as Microsoft can't get it right on the first go.

Because software is made to be multipurpose. They do not have all the customer configurations at their disposal for testing. They cannot predict everything that people will do with it. Console gaming is superior not because of the software, but becasue of the uniformity of the hardware (same goes for the Mac platform).

Tell me this, are you willing to by a car, dvd player or microwave that only sort of works out of the box and the manufacturer promising to fix it at a later date? If not, then why is it acceptable for Microsoft to do this?

Again, because your car is made to do only a handful of things. Try to do something outside of that realm (ie. take your Prius offroading) and your warranty is void by no fault of Toyota. Take your operating system offroading, and somehow you're expecting the OS to protect us or recover from it. That doesn't make for a fair comparison.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[tushar]

Guess you've never suffered through a botched libc update.

That is so 1990's.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ady1]

DirectX and a lot of mulimedia related stuff was actually usable on XP. I used to have a dual boot system with Win2k and 98 before XP. Also win2k was hellishly slow to boot. Xp made a significant improvement there.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[man_of_mr_e]

Honestly, that's just the way software is these days. Open Source is the same way, except they just call stuff beta for 5,10 or more years.

With any reasonably complex project, if you wait for it to be perfect before you ship it, you go out of business (if you're a commercial company) or you lose relevance (for open source). Meanwhile, for the 99% of people that don't have problems, they wonder why you haven't shipped already, and if you ship then 1% of people cry because they think you shipped too early.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Com2Kid]

Battery life went from 1h 40min to 2h 30minutes.
The system now boots to usable state in 3 minutes. With vista, it took 28 minutes to actually get to login screen. Wow, umm, dude. You have something wrong with whatever crappy apps are getting installed on your system. My Vista box starts up in less than 30 seconds. Even my corporate Vista machine takes less than 3 minutes. I get annoyed if Outlook takes more than 20 seconds to load, most of the time it is instant.

What do you have installed on your machine, BDSM2.0?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[_xeno_]

It's not the same thing. Yes, it has the same name (thanks Microsoft) but it's different. The Wikipedia article you mentioned makes this clear: only Windows 2003 and Vista have the ability to actually save the Shadow Copy to disk. Under XP, it's just a copy in memory. (Sort of like how files work in Linux.)

The Previous Version feature in Windows Vista uses the Shadow Copy feature in NTFS to pull older versions. But only Vista actually runs the service that makes the backup copies. Windows XP does not have this feature.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Com2Kid]

Slap your exchange administrator around a bit until he fixes things. If people are waiting that long to use their machines, it is costing the company $$$.

I'm on an Exchange server with 10k+ users on it, and my Vista machine boots quickly.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[timster]

I think you're being a little too hard on Slashdotters in general. For one thing, a lot of us have had to support Windows systems of all shapes and sizes, and we've all collected various frustrations over the years. It's natural to see some people letting off steam when the topic comes up.

As for the pattern you've noticed, I seem to recall that there was a lot of praise around here for Windows 2000 upon release, and looking back it's obvious that Microsoft accomplished a whole lot with that particular release. Since then they've used a huge amount of programmer time (with smart programmers, no doubt) and the tangible accomplishments seem very small. Maybe Vista is not so bad (haven't used it myself), but does it really represent what we should expect from a programming organization as well-funded as Microsoft?

Personally, I'm reminded of Intel's mis-steps in the 90s, with Itanium. It's not that Itanium was the worst project ever -- it just seemed like so much talent had managed to produce not very much product. I would argue that Linux and OSX have made comparatively great strides in the same period, and there is room to seriously raise the question of what is wrong with Windows development.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[DarrenBaker]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Malc]

Perhaps you can tell me how to uninstall apps on the Mac? It seems like after a few years one would have an accumlation unwanted crap everywhere. Dragging the app from the Application folder to the trash doesn't uninstall everything else that app's installer has placed on the system. And, most apps don't appear to have uninstallers.

Yes, I have a MBP and love it, but let's not biased. I haven't had to reinstall Windows for years. One of my work laptops that I've spent thousands of hours on as a software developer (read: abusing the system) is still running its original XP install after more than four years. Never had to reinstall Windows 2000 either, which I used for years, except when I accidentally trashed part of the partition it was installed on playing around with Grub or Lilo from within Linux.

As for my Mac... well it keeps crashing and hanging up if I connect my external drive via ExpressCard (ExpressCard bought at the Apple Store no less), and VMWare keeps forcing me to reboot when it has problems. Of course, unlike the anti-Microsoft zealots on this site who'd blame both Microsoft and Windows for these kinds of issues, I'm not about to blame either Apple or OS X.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Allador]

Secondly this whole "Vista is maturing" rubbish doesn't work. Vista is not a child, pet or a plant. It's not expected to grow. It should work out of the box. Of course it matures. All software matures. It gets patched. Drivers get better. Third party software gets better. IT pros get better at managing it. Resellers get better at making machines that work well out of the box on it.

Your suggestion that nothing changes once a v1.0 product releases is what is rubbish. All of what I describe is true of nearly every piece of software, and definitely all OSs.

Console gaming was always superior to PC gaming in terms of quality because there wasn't any patching. No patching? Every console I've ever owned (except the SNES) has patched itself. And games on them have received patches. And this seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me, as my current xbox 360 can do so very many things that my SNES back in the day could never do.

There is no reason software companies, especially one as large and as rich as Microsoft can't get it right on the first go. And lets follow that line of thought.

Compare an operating system to a car. A car is at least a couple orders of magnitude simpler (ie, less complexity) than an Operating System. And it has a high risk of death or injury if they dont get something right. Whereas with an OS the worst risk is some minor property loss.

Yet cars have lots of problems. Lots of recalls. Lots of problems that dont cost car manufacturers enough money to make it worth going through a recall. Lots of poor user engineering, and inherently faulty (ie, fast fail) designs.

And operating systems are a little worse. But the complexity is hugely bigger, and the risks/downsides are much less.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Not ideal, but quite in line with a pragmatic approach to reality.

Why do you think company size and wealth should translate to better products? There is absolutely no evidence (and much counter evidence, Brooks, et al) to show that bigger companies produce better software.

Tell me this, are you willing to by a car, dvd player or microwave that only sort of works out of the box and the manufacturer promising to fix it at a later date? Yeah, thats how pretty much all those industries work. Every car I've ever bought has been inferior to the one that came out the very next year. They keep doing crazy stuff like making improvements, adding new features, and overall refining the product. Kind of like software.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Thalagyrt]

What's that have to do with a Vista workstation taking 28 minutes to boot though? Originally the discussion was about a Vista workstation, not about AD/Exchange servers.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[CastrTroy]

Because the Vista license came with the computer, and buying a Windows 2000 license for the computer would have added quite a percentage to my $500 laptop.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Allador]

You've got it backwards.

XP was only passable because of 7+ years of maturing on largely the same core system. But it had many huge glaring defects in its underlying systems. It was broken by (legacy) design, and only usable through many years of polish.

Vista has many things finally done right internally, with huge, technically and architecturally improved internals. But Vista failed miserably at: marketing (particularly around the Vista capable garbage), hardware ecosystem (ie, bad drivers), software ecosystem (ie, poorly built software that didnt work in Vista's locked down environment).

But like XP, Vista will mature, and the market will adapt around it. And once it stabilizes, its a vastly technically superior system than XP was, albeit at a cost of massively increased resource requirements.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Allador]

Oh, by the way, can anyone confirm whether or not this is fixed yet: Disable indexing, then try to type something into the search in the Start menu. Watch system explode, because each character spawns a new thread to search, without killing the old one. Doesn't take very much to bring the whole thing crashing down. Just tested this on my box, and it does not perform as you describe.

The hard drive is hit a bit more, and the results take a little longer, and the processor jumps to 10-20%, but thats the only difference I see.

And frankly, my suggestion would be to leave indexing on. You take a 1-2 day hit in performance (more or less, depending how much data you have and how fast your machine is), once ever. Then its indexed, and you never get hit by that drive-thrashing business again, but search is instant throughout the OS.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Allador]

You do of course realize that only bad techs do what you describe?

Or (sometimes) organizations that have their imaging process down to such a polish that rolling out a new machine takes 30-60 minutes to completion, and so they make a business/economic decision not to try to do individual troubleshooting unless they detect widespread problems.

But overall what your'e talking about are lazy/incompetent techs.

Everything in windows is repairable. Sometimes its not worth the cost to do so, but good techs will often take the time to figure out why, so that they're armed in the future.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Paracelcus]

Not MSDOS 6.0 shell in graphical mode?

The best thing about 16 bit Windows and/or DOS was the ability to reboot quickly. 32 bit Windows can require a cold reboot to clear.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[maccam]

This same discussion happens every time a new version of Windows is released. So this discussion doesn't happen very often, then?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Real1tyCzech]

Reason: Poor graphics.

For the Vista Aero GUI to outpace the "classic" gui, you need a recent discrete video card with at least 256MB of RAM. ...anything less and Aero doggs it.

That said, with the proper video card, Aero takes the GUI overhead off of the CPU and rests it squarely where all display-work *should* lay...at the feet of the GPU.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[PrescriptionWarning]

while ignorance can often be bliss, can it not often also be a bitch? while its not possible to know everything, its very possible and preferred to know something, often just a small amount will go an incredibly long way.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SanityInAnarchy]

Oh, I would very likely leave it on.

The point of that exercise -- finally fixed, wow -- was to demonstrate how terminally stupid Vista is. Not that the results take longer, but that it would spawn anywhere from 5-30 threads (depending how much you typed) and not terminate them or pool them in any way.

Kind of goes with the whole "drop your network performance to 10% by playing music" bug. Not feature, bug.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Kiaser Zohsay]

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.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[atraintocry]

For me, starting from scratch with a fresh Windows installation makes the most sense right after a new service pack comes out (like right now). It's a new baseline. You slipstream or install a single service pack, rather than hundreds of updates. May as well just go the safer route for now.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[CastrTroy]

Find me a $500 laptop that comes preinstalled with Linux.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[atraintocry]

I feel your pain, but I think you should re-image the beast sooner than later...I did about 25 SP3 installs on Wednesday, some interactive, some through WSUS, on lots of different hardware setups. None had any problems.

I've used system restore a few times but something about it makes me a little skittish.

Unfortunately it looks like they changed the normal activation setup to now require Genuine Advantage. We have our licenses in order, but I am so sick of them sneaking that in (like with WMP 11).

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[RKThoadan]

Wrong. It is broken by design:

A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Summary: Vista is spending a significant amount of resources making sure you aren't doing anything it doesn't like.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[atraintocry]

Not trying to sound like a shill but...People who don't know any better need those messages there so that they don't inadvertently trash the OS. If you are smart/brave enough to blow past them, then you weren't the intended recipient anyway.

Also, while there's quite a lot of the darker regions of Windows are undocumented, the KB is huge, and growing all the time. It's rare that I'll have to dig much farther than Microsoft.com to find the answer to a problem, even something very complicated.

No, the problem is the *registry*. It's what, five files? It stores the configuration for all of the OS and 90% of the applications, plus drivers, network stacks, shared library locations...it's like having all your (millions of) eggs in a spiky basket. Regular users need to be warned against screwing with it. Not because the users shouldn't have control over their own system, but because Microsoft has coded themselves into a corner.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[skiflyer]

Have you run vista?

On a machine that handles it, or on a machine with the eye candy turned off it's a definite improvement over XP in most categories.

There are definitely a few sticky points, but the search features alone are enough to keep me on my vista boot partition exclusively. The improved stability/speed/trinkets just make it easier.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Archangel Michael]

I use Windows Deployment Services (formerly Remote Installation Services/pre 2k3 sp2). Only Gotcha here is that you'll have to learn how to do Legacy Mode for XP.

DO NOT setup WDS in Native Mode.

I also slipstream with instructions found here:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

Along with Driver Packs http://driverpacks.net/

Build a CD image slipstreamed with Driver Pack, use this image to build a WDS legacy mode Installer. You'll have to figure out the answer file used by WDS, and the peculiar stuff WDS has, as well as extract from the CD the proper OEMPnPSetup Path created by Driver Packs, from the proper file.

And using AD to deploy MSI files to computers ...

It is a dream using this setup, F12 a couple of times (PXE boot) Type in Username/Password and walk away. When the computer is done loading/rebooting it is ready to use.

Implementation difficulty 8.5 (mostly due to MS WDS)

Usability difficulty 1
(Scale 1 easy, 10 difficult)

I don't use RISprep because I have had nothing but problems with it, but one of my colleagues swares by it for "lab" setups.

This is just an overview, and if you're halfway technical should be able to figure out the details from various online sources. If not, I can be hired to help further.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[clampolo]

But as a computer science graduate and a UNIX user who cares a lot about operating system design, I think Vista is a huge step up...I think Vista is a huge step up

You think it is a step up to provide drastically lower performance and use drastically more system resources? And forget about how awful that security stuff is. I have to run most of my older programs as administrator anyway since Vista is a pile of crap and won't let them save files if I dont run them that way.

Please note that I always used to be a MS user. Mainly because I have some apps that only run on MS. Vista was the straw that broke this camel's back.

I finally got off my ass and read up on Linux and installed it. I was shocked that it took less time to get Linux installed and running than it was to get Vista running on a machine where it was preinstalled!!! I had to go through a maze of registrations and tons of other dialogs on Vista before it would run. I remember cursing like a sailor in the middle of it and driving off to the local bar to cool off (im lucky and have a bar a nice 5 minute walk away from me.) I went through fewer (I am NOT making this up) dialog boxes installing Linux than I did to do all the dumb registrations on Vista.

I will probably never go back to MS again. They offer nothing over Linux that is worth an extra $100 - in fact they offer less.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Allador]

This again?

Gutmann ranks up there with such notoriety as Steve Gibson.

Since you so kindly linked it (as if anyone hasnt seen that waaaay back when it came out), did you bother to read it?

Do you notice that nowhere in the entire write-up does it ever mention whether any of Gutmann's theories are actually based on the product itself? Or just his theories about how someone might write an OS based on some white papers and documentation he's read?

Because, in true media-savvy pseudo-scientific fashion, Gutmann never actually makes any claim that any of his theories are actually borne out in the actual product. In fact, based on his writeup there, he's NEVER ACTUALLY TESTED ANY OF HIS THEORIES.

Think about that for a second. A research scientist who makes huge claims about a product, based on his theoretical modelling of how it probably worked based on some white papers and documentation he read, but never actually tested whether any of his theories are true.

Thats not being a very good scientists.

You have to take stuff like this with a grain of salt, you can't just believe everything you read.

I'll state it again, for clarity:

ALL of Gutmann's Vista postings are theoretical.

He has NEVER (based on that document) tested any of his theories against the actual product.

Nearly all of his theories are based on how he believes 3rd party IHVs would develop drivers if they adhered perfectly to the spec, which they are not required to do. ....

All that being said, even if all of Gutmann's theories were perfectly borne out in reality (which they dont appear to be), these are all optional systems.

In addition, one bad optional subsystem does not make the entire product broken by design. There are numerous huge improvements to the underlying product. Just the lightweight MAC style perms on services, and the windowing re-write to prevent shatter style attacks, are big. The new process scheduler and I/O scheduler are huge. The kernel patch protection is just .... gargantuan. SMB2 for high bandwidth high latency networks is years overdue, but very welcome.

There are literally dozens more.

And lastly, as my business' self-chosen Vista guinea pig (Vista Business x64), I've got to say its been surprisingly good. I havent run into any of Gutmann's theoretical problems, and the system has been quite amazingly stable. Much more so than my XP boxes were, at least as measured by how long my laptop can do its daily duty (4-10 standby/hibernates, and several dozen network/vpn switches) without needing to be rebooted. In general, my lapto is still quite stable when super tuesday comes up each month, and still not needing a reboot.

Based on my direct, personal experience (ie, not theoretical rumblings), Vista has made some significant fundamental improvements in the Windows OS. However, it was released rough, and is still stabilizing.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Archangel Michael]

Regarding the link you provided, the terminology used in SYSPREP and RIS is very similar and it uses a lot of the same formats. It is a good overview.

I would also recommend you look at

http://www.highwaycsl.com/IT/Whitepapers/W2003SP2WDS.pdf

Which is WDS specific. I haven't looked at everything in the PDF, but it looks like it covers most things well enough.

Good luck

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[neoform]

AppZapper takes care of a lot of the crap.

Plus you can always troll around in the library directory.

Though, I must say, it's very hard to get access to files that are installed with root privs..

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ickoonite]

Honestly, that's just the way software is these days. Open Source is the same way, except they just call stuff beta for 5,10 or more years.

Yes, but the difference with Windows is that you pay a small fortune for it. And if it's broke, you can't just poke at the code to fix it.

With Vista, all of this has become even more pronounced. Not only was it terribly late anyway, but it was shipped in this really rather broken state. Given that it took them five years to deliver it, waiting another 6 months to deliver something that actually works would have gone a long way to giving Microsoft some credibility. Instead, now they have next to none, with the result that everyone - from the student off to university right up to massive multinational enterprises - is avoiding Vista like the plague.

I think the root of the problem is that Microsoft has lost its way. Completely. Back when they had someone to compete with, the releases came thick and fast, as with Internet Explorer when they were out to crush Netscape. But now, for whatever reason, the company has ground to a halt. Apologists are talking about Windows 7, about eschewing backwards compatibility, a break from the past, a leaner, more modular system - in short, everything Windows Vista was supposed to be. But it won't happen.

Face it, Microsoft is dying.

:|

(Yes, I admit, that last line is a little dramatic. But these days it has an eerie ring of truth to it...)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[incripshin]

I know you can do the same with a Knoppix CD So Linux Live CDs are huge security vulnerabilities waiting to happen? Nice to know. To be serious, physical access is the security vulnerability. It always has been. If it concerns you, disable booting from optical drives, password protect your BIOS and bootloader, and get a lock for your case. Another choice is to encrypt your vista partition.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blahbooboo3]

No one minds reinstalling for newer releases. The OP is taking about having to reinstall the same version over and over again. I don't mind starting for scratch for Windows XP -> Windows Vista upgrade. But having to reinstall just Windows XP every year just to clear all the crap it has accumulated over the year is ridiculous. exactly :)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Antiocheian]

Vista's maturing, and as it does it'll become a better operating system Vista is beyond repair because

1) it is not compatible with 2K/XP device drivers

2) it's much slower than XP while XP was a bit faster than 2000 (due to prefetch).

3) due to disk space, pixel shader and memory requirements it's a bad choice for cheap or ultra-portable laptops.

Vista will never mature, just as MS DOS 4 never did. Microsoft worked their asses out to make MS DOS 5 that was a real improvement to MS DOS 4 and more importantly MS DOS 3.3 which everyone was using at the time. The situation is exactly the same: DOS 4 was the hated memory hog (and slow to boot from diskettes) while DOS 3.3 was a refined and perfected version with low footprint.

It remains to be seen whether Windows 7 will be what DOS 5 was.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blahbooboo3]

The real problem is that operating systems are complex beasts.

No, the real problem is that our industry has yet to learn how to adequately manage complexity.

Instead, we add new features... making the problem worse.

Sooner or later, this problem will have to be dealt with. It will be painful.

excellent insight!

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[incripshin]

My point is that they are making definite progress. Privilege separation is handled far better in Vista. I wouldn't run any pre-Vista software as admin for the same reason that I don't do anything as root. If software doesn't work properly as root without good reason (such as listening on a reserved port like ftp), I will refuse to ever run it. This admin-only software was not written with security in mind, so it isn't worth a thought.

Registrations are a part of using commercial software. If you want to use commercial software in Linux, you have to deal with the same thing.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Z80xxc!]

The thing is that Windows XP essentially IS windows 2000. Sure, there are many improvements, but they're really quite similar. Remember, Windows 2000 was NT 5.0, Windows XP was NT 5.1. Vista, though it has lots of bits of XP in it is a much larger difference - jumping from NT 5 to NT 6. It has far more new and changed features, settings and behaviors compared to XP than XP did compared to 2000. At the time, there wasn't a pressing need to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP since the benefits were negligible. That said, as XP has matured, it has become a clear winner over Windows 2000, now that most applications support it and not 2000, and it still has mainstream support. Vista though is still brand new, and as a much larger change than that from 2000 to XP, will present many more problems. It is possible that Vista will mature just as XP has, or maybe MS has broken too many things; we'll have to wait and see.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Macthorpe]

Absolutely agree with you. My answer was a mild parody of original poster's assumption that Windows is the only OS which can be 'hacked' that way.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jawtheshark]

The Asus EEE PC ;-) Oh, come on, that was too easy.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jawtheshark]

Wireless support, Remote Desktop and Fast User Switching. If it weren't for those, I'd be using W2k instead of XP. W2k is much much lighter....

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[rapidweather]

I have a Ubuntu 7.10 install, with KDE, that won't update anymore. I have tried and tried, now have 30 or so items in the update list. Once, I got one to update, but when I tried all 30, it just sat there and did nothing. So, I'll probably have to start over, now upgrading to the newest Ubuntu. Download the .iso, format and install, I suppose. The 7.10 updater won't let me use it to upgrade to latest version, although it did figure out that a new version is available. I'm running a HP 8250 with maximum RAM, and a 160GB 7200 HDD, with Comcast cable modem. Not the fastest, but does work well with Ubuntu 7.10. Here's a screenshot. That one was taken before KDE was added.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[VFA]

Well, even better than eeePC, which is not really a laptop, but rather a blackberry with a thyroid problem (I am sure it has its place in the marketplace, but the guy was asking to replace his PC, which undoubtedly has more than 4G mass storage), take a look at Dell Vostro. They start at $399 and come with Windoze XP. Sure the thing has a single core AMD processor and 1GB of memory and 80G hard drive, and no DVD burner (just reader), but if you beef the system up to dual core AMD, 2GB of RAM, 120GB drive and a DVD burner, you are only at $519 with free shipping. In fact now they have a new model that uses intel dual core chip for the same price.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[sc7]

I don't care what anybody tells me, but an operating system should never need more than a $500 desktop to run this day and age. If $500 can run Xp perfectly, it should at least be able to do the same basics Xp can do perfectly, maybe not the flashy new Vista features, but email and internet shouldn't be slowed on the same machine by a new OS.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[jawtheshark]

I'm no Windows apologist, but a properly maintained Windows XP installation won't ever need a reinstall. I have XP installations running installed when SP2 came out (that's in 2004), and they still run strong. Of course, it involves running users as non-admin, using Firefox instead of IE and Thunderbird instead of Outlook.... However, a competent admin can and will run XP without ever needing to reinstall it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[assassinator42]

First, wasn't XP the successor to ME? Of course, even benchmarks Microsoft was using to push XP showed ME was slower than 98. A bit more contrast for people upgrading from ME to XP, I suppose.
Second, the new Intel integrated graphics chips can handle Aero just fine, and I'm assuming the AMD integrated graphics chips do as well. You certainly don't need an expensive new graphics card, just a new computer. Of course, Compiz/Beryl works much better: it has cooler effects and runs on much less powerful hardware.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Smauler]

Another Vista user here, and it's mostly been fine - I've got a new system, so system reqs are no problem. One problem I did have on installation was that it just locked up half way through - turns out that Vista 64 does not like 4Gb on nvidia chipset motherboards, and will just die without warning or explanation. I tried grabbing the hotfix with my 2k install, but guess what - it's a certified users only deal, so I couldn't grab it. I eventually just took 2gb out until I got it all sorted. Secondly, my wireless took ages to get sorted. The driver that was supposed to work on Vista 64 didn't, again with no explanation why. I eventually found out what chipset it was, and tried the standard Vista driver, and it worked (Belkin wireless card revision 3, uses Railink drivers supplied with Vista, btw). Thirdly, I ran into the truly annoying and utterly shit "calculating remaining time" bug when transferring files across a network. It just sits there indeterminately, doing bugger all, then won't let you cancel, so you've got to kill explorer and let your desktop restart. I now always just use robocopy when copying files over the network.

That was the bad, now the good : everything else. Stability is 100% (the longest I've actually had it up is a fortnight or so), Speed is very good, it boots from the boot manager to desktop in 15 seconds (yes, that fast), and it is just pretty easy to use. Just don't try running it on older hardware, be prepared to take a little while to get it set up, and you should have few problems with it.

And the reason I bought it? - Gaming. I figure not paying MS just 60 quid in 5 years or so wouldn't have brought the giant to it's knees, so I'm not too fussed.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blackknight]

If you need that get Windows Server 2003. I run it on my desktop and it works great, it's also very stable.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[cbreaker]

Ohh, don't get me wrong, I agree with your point about Linux. It actually IS easier to learn a lot about Linux and it's usually very easy to find answers to questions with a simple google search.

The registry isn't quite as complicated as it seems, though. Much of it is dynamic data that's used by running programs, a bunch of it is of little consequence, and of the important stuff there's not too much. A lot of the seemingly cryptic GUID-based entries are named that way for a reason; so that a device name can change yet the configuration data for it remains in the same place.

The point about not being able to learn the stuff isn't exactly valid, but yea, any normal documentation won't even mention the "behind the scenes" stuff on Windows. Still, it's out there, or else nobody would ever be able to write any apps for Windows.

It's a shame, though - about the registry. A good idea abused to shit because of the way it's used. A central configuration repository isn't a bad idea.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it.

No, you won't. A US$450 PC runs Vista fine.

Seriously, when the most important factor in Vista's (like OS X's) performance is RAM, and 2G of RAM costs under US$50, in no way do you need "a pretty good system". The PC necessary to run Vista well hasn't been "pretty good" for years.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Yes, but the difference with Windows is that you pay a small fortune for it.

You know, I thought the same thing about the cost of Windows (or any other piece of large, complex commercial software out there) until I sat down and did the math. What I found was surprising.

Let's assume you buy the fairly-standard Windows Vista Business Edition. Newegg lists it for $279, assuming you get the full retail version and not an OEM or upgrade version. Now let's assume you use it for three years. XP users have waited five years, but MS claims they'll never go that long again between upgrades. Time will tell if MS can actually do it, but I digress.

Three years is 1,095 days (assuming no leap years). That means the amortized cost of that Vista buy is right around $0.26, or a tad more than a quarter a day. Most people probably spend more than that on coffee. Unless you work at home (or are unemployed, or walk/ride a bike), you definitely spend several times that amount on either gas for your car or a subway/bus fare every day. If you have the typical $39/month DSL Internet feed, you're paying five times as much per day for that feed compared to the cost of Vista. Depending upon what kind of PC you have and what power costs are like in your area, your daily Slashdot surfing probably costs you more in electricity than Vista does.

Now, you can say that things like Fedora Core are free and thus have no amortized costs, and you'd be right. But to say that Windows costs a "small fortune" is utter absurdity. When considered over the course of a typical Windows OS lifespan, it's probably one of the smallest computer-related costs you'll incur. Even if you throw in Office 2007 Professional ($389 at Newegg), the cost per day only goes up to $0.61 per day. You can't even buy a bottle of Coca-Cola for that. A small fortune? I don't think so.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Vista is a whole new, from the ground up OS.

No, it's not. Vista is Windows NT 6.0. XP was Windows NT 5.1. It's no different than going from some Linux 2.4 based distro to some Linux 2.6 based distro.

There's still NOTHING in XP I can't also do in Visa [...]

Easily run as a non-Admin user.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Vista likely runs fine an a $2000 desktop. Perhaps even a $1000 one. (I made a amd X2 6000 with 4 GB of memory for that.) However, a typical consumer unit is one your mother bought for $500 and thinks should be fine. If she waited a year or two to buy a vista computer: it would meet the real-world requirements.

Bullshit.

US$450 buys you dual cores and 2G of RAM. That runs Vista fine.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Smauler]

The end of world is neigh

Just FYI, the word you were looking for is "nigh". Neigh is the sound a horse makes. I may be missing an obscure reference to the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse, and to be honest I probably prefer your version anyway - makes you look at horses in a different light.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

By design it fuzzes your video if not on HDCP compliant hardware and it detects media of a fairly broad type.

It does nothing of the sort.

I will never understand why people just flat-out _lie_ about this sort of thing. What's the point ? Why do you care so much about what OS *other people* use that you want to lie in a pointless attempt to try and dissuade them ?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Smauler]

My previous system was over 5 years old and had had Windows 2000 on since new, no reinstalls, nothing. It was stable as a rock until the end. Perhaps you're doing something you shouldn't with your Windows systems?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[toddestan]

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=8224470

You can keep the change.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[toddestan]

its hardware requirements were acceptable. Most exisitng and practically all new computers were able to run XP when it was released.

Really? In 2001 a typical mid-range new machine would have been an early model P4 with 256MB of ram, which by todays standards most of us would consider pretty slow for XP. A lot of home machines would have been more along the lines of a PII/PIII with 64-128MB of ram, and those would be unsuitable for using XP (though the hardware was still capable of running it). I would say it wasn't until a year or two later when a mid-range system came standard with 512MB that XP really ran well on the typical computer.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

But repairs in Linux cost far less than the cost of a new system. Also, even with a new machine, wouldn't you want your files from the previous one?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

If I had a hardware fault, I might consider replacing the machine (though I would prefer to replace the part). For a software fault, I'd rather try to repair the system.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dbIII]

In a word? Multimedia

You can download free media players that also work on win2k.

Security

We are talking about a set of operating systems where desing flaws meant opening a picture can run code embedded inside the image and give you a virus! A lot of people have their machines behind quite decent firewalls on their modems now anyway and all of the third party antivirus software runs on win2k anyway.

There are situations where XP is useful but it fails on the two extremes. Low powered machines don't have the resources to run XP but can have the resources to run win2k and the software you use on the machine in the first place (that paticular beast is nice and small but has the memory under a glued in heatsink - no XP for it). High powered machines running demanding applications are hampered by the extra resource usage of XP so i have some on win2k. The largest annoyance I had with XP in a case between the two extremes is the limits to shared connections - suddenly people couldn't all just dump files on the receptionists machine as they did when it was an NT4 or win2k box. It really is not an operating system for the workplace but really something for hobbyists at home. Fundtionally I think it inferior to Win2k in many situations.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

Because in Linux (and I would guess *BSD) the OS tools don't break. Even if your mess up your system with bad /etc files, it's not too hard to toss in a Live CD, fire up a text editor, and fix the problem. The fact that the base configuration is stored in plain text files is a feature, not a bug.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dbIII]

The question really is how many machines are in that "Exchange server" - only one and you have a lot of problems, several and you can cover the gaps. Exchange has improved a lot over the years - complete backups are now possible for one thing - but I still prefer conventional email instead.

Cue the fanboys with comments like "on Exchange 5.5 only a complete n00b would try to do a backup good enough for bare metal recovery - that means shutting the thing down for hours!".

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dbIII]

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.

Useful and a fairly standard feature of any computer system. I picked up a Sun machine at auction and blanked the root password in a similar way (but had to use "ed" to edit it).

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

Why should regular users need to understand their radial arm saw?

One of the dumber statements /. has accepted in recent history. Sheesh...

I think you missed the poster's intent. He was not suggesting that one use power tools in such a manner, he was criticizing the previous poster. I believe this technique is called "sarcasm".

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dbIII]

The real point where 32 bit Vista annoys me is that the minimum RAM is so close to the maximum RAM. People will point the blame elsewhere but it really comes down to Micorsofts incomplete support of every x86 processor since the Pentium Pro.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

If the problem is in the kernel, you can at least go back to the previous image (you do save the previous image, don't you?). Also, if the new kernel fails, and you were installing/compiling from source, you might have some idea of the problem. Howdoes one do this in Windows?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[rakzor]

I had vista on my work laptop for 6 months, I kept hoping that SP1 would fix everything.. after installing it.. I downgraded to XP. You mean you upgraded to XP?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sylver Dragon]

Also, it'll do it with your registry. One of Vista's features is that it virtualizes system folders, files and registry entries. When you go to edit one of those areas, and fail to do it with Admin rights (i.e. right-click, Run As Administrator), the change will be stored in your profile and only applied when you log in. It's neat because you can walk away from a fuck up easily; it's annoying because you may forget to run as admin when opening regedit or cmd. This is actually one of the features I really like from Vista. That and the built in chess game are my biggest "want to have" features.

I'm not much on the Aero interface, but my wife loves it. She's easily sold on shiny, and I'm not gonna fight it. On XP, too many people I support (I'm in IT for a living) use the Crayola interface, so I use it to be used to it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[RobertM1968]

Now, lets factor in the new video card to actually use numerous GUI features in Vista Business Edition... oh - but that needs a new motherboard as the one that came in that HP or whatever PC only came with PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-Express (or ancient AGP on a crappy MSI board).

But that also requires a new power supply for the needs of the new board and video card.

Then, if you forgot to ensure the new board didnt come with IDE, you need new SATA drives - and even if you did get an IDE/SATA combo board, will you have enough room after installing Vista Business?

Even if you do, you will definitely need more RAM - unless your machine happened to have been already maxed out (unlike the majority of XP machines I have seen that vary between 256MB and 1.5GB).

Then you will probably need new virus and spyware software - the copy that you have been faithfully paying for updates wont run on Vista - and they wont just give you a free upgrade to the next version that came out when Vista did (gotta remember, it's probably a 2005/2006 AV solution or earlier - not a 2007 one that may entitle you for a Vista version for free).

So, after you add that in... it gets closer to a small fortune.

ok, maybe not. But, it is considerably more than $0

And since we (you) are amortizing the costs over 3 years - then we should actually consider it paid in such fashion - for instance on a credit card - otherwise the costs arent being amortized at all.

OK, now it is definitely a small fortune. Your premise of considering it an amortized cost only works if it actually is going to be - which in this day and age means a credit card where you spend years paying lots of interest and little of the principal. Don't respond with "Well you can pay it all off in 2 months to save on the interest" because then it is no longer being amortized over 3 years.

Just my thoughts...

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sylver Dragon]

I had the exact same memory error on a system I built for a friend. I threw 8GB of RAM in, as RAM is cheap and good for performance (ya, probably overkill for the moment). Boot the CD, and BSOD during the install. Figured I had a bad stick and ran memtest overnight, no errors. Drive test is clean. Oh boy, probably Motherboard or CPU. Decide to google a bit before starting the RMA and found the hotfix. Pulled a couple sticks of RAM, loaded Vista just fine, installed the hotfix, put the RAM back in. The system is now a nice gaming powerhouse.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[theshowmecanuck]

I am talking about the average user, not a power user. Most people don't know how to fix or modify configuration files nor want to know. That is my point. I agree that for people like most of us on Slashdot, fixing a lot of the issues with a Linux install is doable, and many are easy. But we are not the majority of the computer users, even if we rule on Slashdot. And to say Linux and *BSD don't break is stretching things way too far. I have seen updates break things, I have seen Linux not work with a pretty average set of hardware, and I have seen upgrades not work. Linux is not bullet proof. It is very stable yes. And it is tough to make it crash, but you will sound like a Mac fanboy if you keep talking about how it just works and never crashes.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, I just can't agree. My lady has an all-intel Dell Core 2 Duo 1.4something GHz machine (Vostro 1500) with 2GB ram. It came with Vista home basic luser edition and was so. unbelievably. slow... I couldn't believe how slow it was. I slipstreamed the storage driver into an XP CD and installed that, and the system is wonderfully peppy. (It's not a monster, but it's plenty fast.) Vista requires a monstrous machine, with better-than-intel graphics. One last word; I disable the themes service on XP. I'd rather have the snappier win2k interface. But to each their own.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[CastrTroy]

Cool that there are a couple, but seems to be not much selection. I'd rather pay "extra" for the laptop with the windows license and just install Linux later if everything else meets my needs than spend the same amount on a laptop that comes with Linux preinstalled, but gives me no choice as to the features I can get. It's nice to see that these things are starting to become available though.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[randyleepublic]

My problem with Pigsta is more along the lines of Why didn't they actually make it any better? Eye candy and confirmation dialogs don't do anything to fix the big issues I have with XP. How about an uninstall that really works? How about a file system that doesn't just journal, but actually keeps records of every write, allowing you to go back in time if you need to. How about separating the HAL from the rest of the OS, including installed applications, putting the HAL on a built-in flash drive that would be read only, putting everything else on a portable mirrored hard drive, so that way you could take your personal installation with you whereever you go, and it would work just fine on any Windows machine? None of it! Vuck Fista. I use XP64 SP1 behind a router and never get critical updates. No problemo. Also I use Total Uninstall to keep my registry lean and mean. I am having the most issue free run of Windows computing ever. Try it, you'll like it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[fps_dean]

yeah and all linux and unix sucks too so pick your garbage. And there is a huge difference between Vista vs. XP and XP vs. 2000. Until new technology like SLI and Crossfire was made to not work on Windows 2000 (sell more copies of Windows for Microsoft), there really was no need for XP. And even then, it really could have, and should have just been a service pack for 2000. Just as some updates were done for 2003 server that should have also been a service pack for XP, but that never happened either (that would have made XP one sweet OS too). Vista is just downright garbage. It is slow and buggy. If you like constant crashes and blue screens, by all means run Vista. If not, run something else. Even Windows 95 beta is more stable and that is a fact.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[fps_dean]

Maybe if you call ME the previous version, it really should have been a service pack that added some cool features, but instead Microsoft opted to make it a new operating system so they could profit from it, and it made Microsoft a lot more money than Vista ever will make them.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Cl1mh4224rd]

How many millions of XP users were automatically upgraded to sp3? Ummm... None. It's still an optional download.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[fps_dean]

If enough people ran Solaris, you WOULD have viruses and bad software, it's just a matter of time. Plus the amount of time and labor to rebuild Solaris is only like ten times the amount to wipe and reinstall Windows so your problem would have to be pretty bad to have to do a complete reinstall. I've never had to reinstall a NT with the exception of replacing a motherboard. If you aren't a total noob then you wouldn't have either. Noobs get a mac, they're very noob friendly and no one codes viruses for them either. Or maybe Vista, because they make everything as hard as it can possibly be for people who know what they are doing and take away as many options as they can.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[IntlHarvester]

haha. Who exactly are you going to hire to repair your linux system? A $75/hour enterprise unix admin?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sobrique]

Yeah, but you have to concede that may only say something about your own level of familiarity with the two products, and have absolutely nothing to do with how the products are actually constructed. For instance, if I have a DNS problem in Solaris, I'd have no clue how to tackle and resolve it. But if I had the same problem in Windows, I'd type "ipconfig /flushdns" and more than likely the problem's solved. Then a week later it comes up on Slashdot, and I write a post exactly like yours but the opposite. I was able to fix Windows much easier than reinstalling it, but that damned Solaris is so difficult I had to reinstall it! And of course that would apply regardless of what the product is; I'd always find the one I'm more familiar with easier to fix than reinstall, and the one I'm less familiar with harder to fix than reinstall. In short, I don't find your argument compelling. At least, not without more information about your background.

Fair point.

How about:

I started doing sysadmin in a mixed OS environment when I was at University. Solaris and Windows machines being used in an uneasy truce. Ever since I've been working on both for about 10 years.

In this time, I've had 'users' working on both, and 'doing their thing'. Now, it may be that there's a difference in style of user you get on either - it was the engineers and developers who were fans of Solaris, and the sales team were much happier with Outlook.

I have had infrastructure running on both platforms, and on numerous occasions caught myself wishing the Windows infrastructure was 'more like Solaris' - because literally everything 'is a file', on the fly fixes to ... well, to follow on for your example - DNS problems. I have 'truss' built into the OS, so if my nslookup fails, I can see exactly which 'bit' caused it to fail. New versions of Solaris have DTrace, which is even better at that sort of thing. The sysinternals and drwatson diag tools in windows are acceptable alternatives, but ... not really anywhere close in terms of what they tell me, and let me analyze.

Solaris config and 'stuff' can be a bit on the obscure side, I agree - there is a tendancy to 'if you know which file to edit, it's fine'. But at the same time, the process isolation on Solaris, in my experience, has meant that it is phenomenally rare for one process to trigger a failure cascade that leads to needing a reboot.

Hardware redetection too - yes, there _has_ been occasions where you need to restart, but mostly it's actually very easy to rediscover and instantiate new devices. Windows catches up on this one (part of me wonders how much open source microsoft is using for inspiration, not that I think that's a bad thing)

Yes, relative experience levels _do_ come into it, and I probably come across as utterly snobbish when I say I've met Solaris admins who have been able to keep servers online almost indefinitely, barring 'systems maintenance' and Windows systems that get 'fixed' by slapping the reset switch every couple of weeks.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sobrique]

Not really, no. Solaris was built as a top down OS, from a world where it was _expected_ to be multi-user. It therefore doesn't actually make any distinction/restriction/arbitrary limitation of 'console' in real use, and the permissions and device access also reflect this design philisophy.

Windows started single user. It's only VERY recently that it's been possible to do remote admin on Windows servers, and even then there's still some stuff that 'just doesn't work' over RDP.

From experience, viruses don't work anywhere near as well in the POSIX permissioning and 'layout' environment. There's clear boundaries of 'stuff' in Solaris, where users Do Not Go. Where 'being able to run' is a file permission that has to be set, rather than a question of which file extension it happens to be, a virus has a MUCH harder time functioning. When your system paths, never ever include things that 'non-root' can touch, and day to day use DOESN'T mean being root at all. Maybe it's just noobishness, but I find a whole boatload of 'windows stuff' that ends up being 'you must be admin to do this' when it really shouldn't.

And I still reckon in a 'rebuild' race, Solaris still wins. Even if you don't include the fact that remote software install is built into the OS.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sobrique]

I really like the Solaris installer. That actually counts as one of my debug tools - boot up a mini-os, start up the stuff I need, and proceed to fix whatever was wrong with the 'real' OS, mounting partitions as I go.

Not to mention being able to do that via Jumpstart, without actually needing to do more than typing a single command on the 'OK' prompt.

But I am a Solaris fanboy in a big way, I'll freely admit. I have worked with, and supported and fiddeled with, and broken many OS variants. HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Windows NT/2000/98/XP/2003, MacOS (both before and after it 'was a Unix'), IRIX, and other 'non computer' OS stuff, like Cisco IOS. There's even a smattering of VMS in there.

Of these, I proclaim my faith in Solaris, as the most luvverly of the lot. Although, VMS did have some very definite plus points, and AIX has a few things that it really does do nicely.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[thetoadwarrior]

Because software is made to be multipurpose. They do not have all the customer configurations at their disposal for testing. They cannot predict everything that people will do with it. Console gaming is superior not because of the software, but becasue of the uniformity of the hardware (same goes for the Mac platform). So you would like me to believe that a Dell machine that launched with Vista and it's little "vista compatible" sticker has some kind of weird ass configuration that Microsoft didn't test for? Isn't the whole point of open betas to cover as many system configurations and unexpected user habits?

You're implying that MS will allow anyone to slap a Vista compatible sticker on any machine which then makes it pointless and you're also implying that they didn't use any of their public testing data or that MS themselves only have like two computers they test on. If my employer can afford to have over 10 different configurations to test its very basic software on then the world's richest company should be able to afford 10 times that at least.

The whole excuse that it's a multipurpose machine is not valid. Certainly not when you expect businesses to run your software and certainly not when free software out performs you. Linux is by no means perfect but I'd expect something I paid hundreds of dollars for to out perform something that's free and has the same hardware issues.

Again, because your car is made to do only a handful of things. Try to do something outside of that realm (ie. take your Prius offroading) and your warranty is void by no fault of Toyota. Take your operating system offroading, and somehow you're expecting the OS to protect us or recover from it. That doesn't make for a fair comparison. Doing something with a car you're not supposed to do implies doing something that voids the warranty. Well that's all well and good but the car manufacturer has taken on some responsibility for the car. Software publishers don't and basically say everything is your fault. That should not be legal.

Secondly, my previous employer was dumb enough to buy a few Vista machines. When I'm given these machines to set up for people and I turn them on for the first time and I'm getting errors and being told that drivers can't be used (drivers which came on the system) and the OS is slow to load. This machine is provided by Dell, it has a little sticker on it which MS tells me to look for because it means the machine I have is the best for running Vista so how is that comparable to driving a Prius off-road?

It's not and when a company wants to tell me this hardware is best for their OS then it better work and they can't fall back on some "it's multi-purpose" when they tell you that hardware is ok and certainly not when it's been launched for the first time and you haven't even installed anything or ran anything on it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[thetoadwarrior]

Of course it matures. All software matures. It gets patched. Drivers get better. Third party software gets better. IT pros get better at managing it. Resellers get better at making machines that work well out of the box on it. Your suggestion that nothing changes once a v1.0 product releases is what is rubbish. All of what I describe is true of nearly every piece of software, and definitely all OSs.

No a piece of software can be fixed but saying it needs to mature implies it's immature and thus not ready. Going from v1.0 to v 2.0 for software is the same as going from Win 95 to Win98. Of course it changes but it is also considered a different product. Which is also why you often have to pay for a major revision.

Console gaming was always superior to PC gaming in terms of quality because there wasn't any patching.

No patching? Every console I've ever owned (except the SNES) has patched itself. And games on them have received patches. And this seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me, as my current xbox 360 can do so very many things that my SNES back in the day could never do. Clearly you never owned anything older than an Xbox. No systems aside from the current gen and the Xbox updated itself. the PSX, SNES and PS2 are all superior machines to the Xbox and don't patch themselves. You're right the 360 does many more things that the SNES does not. It RROD for starters.

The SNES and even the NES did a lot more than you may think. The SNES had satelliview which had online capabilities. The NES had a disk drive and a modem which allowed Japanese gamers to perform stock and bank actions as well as check out game reviews. The reality is, unfortunately for MS (who would like to think they've innovated a lot in console gaming), that the Japanese were already ahead of them as always and just because it didn't take off in America doesn't mean it wasn't done already.

And lets follow that line of thought. Compare an operating system to a car. A car is at least a couple orders of magnitude simpler (ie, less complexity) than an Operating System. And it has a high risk of death or injury if they dont get something right. Whereas with an OS the worst risk is some minor property loss.

Any car engineer would likely tell you that you're wrong. There is more to a car than the steering wheel and gear shift. Secondly, programming plays a major part of car design these days. In fact some cars run Windows if MS can supposedly get it right for the car then why not at home?

Yet cars have lots of problems. Lots of recalls. Lots of problems that dont cost car manufacturers enough money to make it worth going through a recall. Lots of poor user engineering, and inherently faulty (ie, fast fail) designs. And operating systems are a little worse. But the complexity is hugely bigger, and the risks/downsides are much less. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Not ideal, but quite in line with a pragmatic approach to reality.

Exactly, when a car does fowl up on a massive scale it's taken off the market. That's not the case with an OS and an OS isn't just something you play around with. It's used to run businesses and takes care of a lot of very important data. This isn't something that should just be released in a half assed manner by a company that takes zero responsibility for what it does.

Why do you think company size and wealth should translate to better products? There is absolutely no evidence (and much counter evidence, Brooks, et al) to show that bigger companies produce better software.

Of course it should translate into better products. You have more money than anyone else. You should then be able to buy the best programmers, you should be able to have a huge testing facility and just on those two factors alone means you produce something better than some small timer.

Yeah, thats how pretty much all those industries work. Every car I've ever bought has been in

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[WuphonsReach]

Except that:

a) That's $276 that can't go towards other improvements in the business, or that we could use to pay employees a bit more salary. And that $276 buys you zilch in terms of support, while with open-source I could probably get a decent support contract for $100/desktop per year. If I'm going to spend money, it better be to make our jobs easier.

b) We have to deal with tracking the licenses. Which is a damn PITA. Or else we have to install some sort of license server from Microsoft (more $$$ for the hardware and OS). I hate tracking licenses for commercial software.

c) We have to deal with Vista's opinions about tracking whether it is licensed or not. A ticking bomb waiting to go off resulting in support headaches.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[WuphonsReach]

I really prefer 2000 over XP even now.

I used both Win2K and WinXP. WiFi support for my laptops on Win2K was a hodge-podge of poorly written vendor-specific tools. Having that integrated in WinXP was a very nice upgrade.

(Other then that, moving from Win2K to WinXP was a non-event other then the activation nonsense. It also helped that WinXP played well with games a bit better then Win2K.)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[WuphonsReach]

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.

No it didn't.

1) If the attacker has physical access to the machine, the game is already up.

2) There were already a dozen other methods to get access to the contents of a NTFS formatted drive.

(The only objection that might have merit would be if the DVD allows you access to EFS encrypted files without having to supply the user's password. But then, EFS was never that secure in the first place. And besides, since the attacker has physical access to the machine - the game is already lost, barring encrypted partitions like TrueCrypt or PGPDisk.)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[rtb61]

Oh go away. The wireless software that comes with stale piss is crap. The vendor specific software provides far more information and configuration tools and as a bonus disables the windows wireless crap all together blocking a likely security risk.

On another note, there seems to be a damn lot of vista specific posts on what is a stale piss thread. Now a person might be a bit suspicious about a failed support pack when the billy goat has his future locked into the viability astala vista.

Why is it that the last support pack for any windows (P)OS has always proved to be rather problematic in it's installation and at the same time numerous posts start appearing on forums all over the place about upgrading to latest windows (P)OS.

Now, I remember why I disabled automatic windows updates as one of the very first system configuration settings. It gets really annoying when you want to play an old computer game on the toy (P)OS only to have it fail because of some bug ridden patch to fix some bug ridden software, all when you least expect it. I feel really sorry for all those inexperienced users who leave automatic updates on windows running but, their free beta testing at least saves me losing some play time ;).

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[David Gerard]

Heh. My work laptop is a HP Compaq 6710b - 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 1GB memory. It dual-boots XP and Linux. Running the same software (Minefield for the most part), Ubuntu 8.04 (with Linux kernel 2.6.24) gets three hours, XPsp2 gets two. It's got a "Vista Basic" sticker on it ... I shudder to think what the battery life would be like.

And by the way: PowerTop is fantastic stuff. It even suggests stuff to stop running to save battery.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Just my thoughts...

For those who have ever wondered what a "strawman argument" is, those "thoughts" are a textbook example.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

But as a computer science graduate and a UNIX user who cares a lot about operating system design, I think Vista is a huge step up.

The "design" of Vista doesn't differ significantly from the design of Windows NT 3.1 when it was released 15 years ago. Especially from a security perspective.

Something I would expect a "computer science graduate" to be well aware of.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

XP was considered bloat and XP doubled the minimum requirements from 2000 Pro.

Time between Windows 2000 and Windows XP: 18 months. Or, roughly, the time it takes computer power to double.

Vista quadruples the minimum XP processing requirement, octuples XP minimum RAM, decuples the minimum HDD free space, and adds a new requirement for video cards.

Time from XP to Vista: 6 years or 72 months. Approximately 4 iterations of the "doubling" principle. Hardware today is on the order of 10-15x faster and bigger than it was when XP was released, not to mention cheaper (ie: price points have reduced).

You can run Vista well on a PC that costs less than US$500. With relatively minor upgrades, it will run useably on PCs up to about 7 years old. How, in any way, is that unreasonable ?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

The real point where 32 bit Vista annoys me is that the minimum RAM is so close to the maximum RAM. People will point the blame elsewhere but it really comes down to Micorsofts incomplete support of every x86 processor since the Pentium Pro.

No, it comes down to buggy hardware and software. All "non home" versions of Windows support PAE just fine. However, since "home" machines are typically saddled with shitty hardware, accompanied by even shittier software, that simply breaks when something crazy like PAE comes along, the option is disabled on those versions.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

There is no reason software companies, especially one as large and as rich as Microsoft can't get it right on the first go.

Sure there is. Fundamentally, their product depends on third-party hardware and software to work. Since they have next to no control over the quality of said hardware and software and since the typically ignorant end user will simply blame the OS (if not the whole computer), then the perception is everything that goes wrong when using a Windows PC is Microsoft's fault.

One of the most obvious examples of this is the historical blaming of "Windows" for application General Protection Faults.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Claiming Slashdot has an irrational hatred of Microsoft is very facile and for some reason seems to be a rather popular thing to do nowadays (there's generally at least three comments to that effect on every MS-related article), but have you ever stopped to think that maybe people have a real *reason* for their dislike?

The vast majority of criticism of Vista is nothing more than ignorance. Most of what's left is flat-out lying, and a tiny, tiny minority of criticism found on Slashdot is actually valid (and usually an issue being actively worked on, if it hasn't been fixed already).

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dbIII]

Incorrect. Meanwhile that exact same hardware works properly in several other operating systems that support PAE. It is poorly written software in terms of how the operating system interfaces with that hardware. Microsoft define how the parameters of how the drivers must work even if third parties write them. They have had over a decade to get it right. It is not the IBM PC anymore and Microsoft define the platform themselves.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Now, lets factor in the new video card to actually use numerous GUI features in Vista Business Edition... oh - but that needs a new motherboard as the one that came in that HP or whatever PC only came with PCI slots and no AGP or PCI-Express (or ancient AGP on a crappy MSI board).... ...blah blah blah...

OK, now it is definitely a small fortune.

OK, now you've gone completely off the deep end in an attempt to make your point.

First off, no one is forcing anybody to put Vista -- a currently-released OS -- on such a hideously old PC as what you're describing. The OS has recommended minimum specs. If your system doesn't meet those requirements, you can (a) continue use XP, (b) pay to upgrade your hardware, or (c) go with an alternative OS. I'll also note the Aero Glass is not a requirement for Vista. You can run it with the basic GUI the same as XP or Win2K if you like. Other than some pretty translucency effects -- stuff that would similarly work either slowly or not at all under high-end Linux GUI -- it doesn't affect the OS at all. You either (a) were ignorant of that fact or (b) purposefully ignored it because it damages your argument.

Second, now that we've established you don't need a new graphics card, your requirement of a new PSU also evaporates. For that matter, you can still buy AGP and PCI video cards. Newegg has an AGP Radeon 2600XT -- which supports DX10 and will run Aero Glass -- which requires no extra power connector for only $149. You'd have to go back eight to ten years to find a motherboard with no AGP slots. Your argument takes another hit.

Third, you further base your premise that you need a new motherboard, and that for some reason it doesn't come with IDE ports on it. I don't know what strange parallel dimension you inhabit, but you have to look hard -- really hard -- to find a modern motherboard that lacks IDE ports. This, of course, assumes you need a new mobo in the first place to run Vista, and it's already been established this is not a requirement. You'd have no difficulty using your old IDE hard drive, so your argument again takes a hit.

Fourth, you mention you need more RAM. Finally, you make a point that's somewhat valid. Vista is quite a RAM hog. XP machines that ran fine with 1GB will be sluggish under Vista. However, you can buy two 2GB sticks (4GB total) of DDR2 for $65 from Newegg. Require DDR instead? Given that it's not used anymore, it'll cost you a bit more: $120 for four 1GB sticks from Newegg. I won't get into SDRAM; if your PC is that old, upgrading is your only practical option if you want to run any modern OS with a high-res, accelerated GUI. So, worst case for RAM is you're spending $120. If this is a small fortune then you need to get a job instead of depending upon your parents for allowance money.

Fifth, you claim you need to antivirus/antispyware. So long as your software isn't more than a couple of years old, this is unlikely. However, if it is older, you probably need to upgrade anyway to protect against new types of threats that the old software didn't address. As an aside, most antivirus/antispyware vendors sell you yearly subscriptions that include upgrades, so this is a moot point if you have current software...which you should if you have any sense.

Last, and perhaps the most nebulous of your "points," is the assertion that people pay for these things with a credit card, and the interest associated with paying it off over three years ruins the amortization figures. Like many of your other above ideas, this is absurd. If you take three years to pay off a $279 operation system purchase, you either have no financial sense or no financial means. In either case, you're better off using a free PC in the public library if you're that strapped for cash. However, I doubt you -- or an

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nevesis]

Software bloat should not grow at the same rate as hardware improvements.

More importantly - your argument is a Microsoft talking point, and doesn't clash with my comment.

My comment was addressing the issue from a single, simple stance: is the bloat worth the features? Did XP have features worth double of 2000, maybe. Does Vista have features worth 10x XP? Not even close.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nevesis]

I'm sorry but how can anyone seriously argue that "our program is bloated, but it's OK because relatively decent hardware can handle it!" with a straight face.

If you have to argue that your bloat is acceptable, then it's too bloated.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Incorrect.

No, it's correct. PAE support is disabled in certain versions of Windows , purely to avoid problematic hardware and software.

Meanwhile that exact same hardware works properly in several other operating systems that support PAE.

But not using the same drivers, obviously. Amazing how when you take out the component where the problem is, the problem disappears, isn't it ?

It is poorly written software in terms of how the operating system interfaces with that hardware.

Microsoft generally don't control how the operating system interfaces with the hardware, because they don't write the drivers.

Microsoft define how the parameters of how the drivers must work even if third parties write them.

However, they have no way of preventing the third parties from "doing it wrong".

They have had over a decade to get it right. It is not the IBM PC anymore and Microsoft define the platform themselves.

Oh, bullshit. The idea that Microsoft have some sort of overbearing influence on the PC architecture as a whole is so stupid, it doesn't even pass the laugh test.

Although it's not quite as idiotic as the suggestion that Microsoft (paraphrasing) 'doesn't get it' about PAE when they have several products that support it. Simple fact is that home PCs with 4G or more of RAM are still uncommon, even today. By the time they are common enough for it to matter, people will be using 64 bit Windows and the problem simply won't exist.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[houstonbofh]

Have you used Win2K lately? It is better than XP in many cases. The problem is that;
1) The improvements are often not improvements.
2) The bloat is greater. 3) Stuff is released before it it ready.
4) Microsoft pushes people, kicking and screaming, to the next half baked version.
5) They drop support for emerging technologies on the older OS so you have to move.
Windows 98 could still be viable is it had USB support that worked, and could run Office 2k3. Win2k would still be viable longer if it could run Office 2k7. And Dx10 may be the XP killer. But one thing NOT driving this is customer demand.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Blakey Rat]

(part of me wonders how much open source microsoft is using for inspiration, not that I think that's a bad thing)

Good ideas get passed all ways in all combinations. From Solaris to OS X, from OS X to Windows, from Linux to Windows, from Windows to Solaris, etc, etc. Bad ideas generally don't.

Yes, relative experience levels _do_ come into it, and I probably come across as utterly snobbish when I say I've met Solaris admins who have been able to keep servers online almost indefinitely, barring 'systems maintenance' and Windows systems that get 'fixed' by slapping the reset switch every couple of weeks.

I think it's pretty true that it's easier to keep a Solaris server running for years on end than it is a Windows server.

But there's a lot of other factors... I think it's safe to say every server installation in this day and age should have some level of redundancy so that you can bring one down and keep running your service on the others, and in that case the difference simply means that Windows servers "exercise" this redundancy more than Solaris ones do.

Plus, it could be 5 times cheaper to run Windows servers instead of Solaris servers, considering hardware, staffing, software, etc. In that case, you could double the number of Windows servers and still end up way ahead. For some reason a lot of techies don't recognize the power of the dollar.

Anyway, thanks for your honest reply.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[incripshin]

:) When I said it was a step up, I really was only considering the mainstream line (98->XP->Vista). I've never used Windows NT. I've taken multiple OS courses, and none of them discussed Windows directly. I never did Windows development. I think you would find that many CS students simply don't care about Windows, and you 'expect [me] to be well aware of' it.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[thetoadwarrior]

Then you should stipulate that hardware companies should test the systems before hand and if they don't function properly in such a painfully obvious way that it blocks CD Burning software then they can't call it a designed for Vista system.

I'm not saying it's fully MS' fault. Dell needs to take some blame but if that Windows sticker is to have any value then MS should put some controls on how it's used if they don't already. Otherwise why waste money putting silly little stickers on the laptop/desktop?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[man_of_mr_e]

Wow, that's a great argument. I mean, if we didn't pay our electricity bill, we could pay our employees more too, and if we didn't pay our internet bill we could pay them more or buy better hardware. If we didn't pay our rent, then we could afford a kick as system for everyone. Why didn't I think of that argument?

There are certain costs that are inherant in running a business. If you don't pay them, you won't BE in business.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[man_of_mr_e]

I actually don't find Vista as bad as most people claim. I think it's largely an image problem, with the most vocal people being those that have never even used it (or used it only very little). Not that it's perfect, but I really don't have many problems.

I had about as many problems with Windows 2000 when it came out (actually, more.. the driver issues were far worse with Win2k than Vista, particularly stuff like Creative Sound Blaster Live). XP was basically a point release of Windows 2000, so by then they had worked out most of the problems.

The difference is that Windows 2000 wasn't marketed as a consumer OS, vista was.

And the argument about being 5 years late is a little misleading. Yes, it's true, but Vista is not the same OS they were working on for most of that time. They were a bit ambitious, and effectively killed off the real "longhorn" in late 2005. Then they started over and the Vista today is really only about 2 years or work. Maybe in irrelevant point, but the "they had 5 years to get it right" argument is equally irrelelvant.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Nicolay77]

In my experience, either you are lying or you are extremely lucky.

I have seen Vista take more than one minute since the moment I press a key and the moment the damn letter appears in screen.

In brand new laptops running Vista.

I however, prefer to choose the latter option, you are extremely lucky.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

I've taken multiple OS courses, and none of them discussed Windows directly. I never did Windows development. I think you would find that many CS students simply don't care about Windows, and you 'expect [me] to be well aware of' it.

I'm incredulous any university-level OS "course" wouldn't cover Windows NT, probably the next most important OS in the modern world outside of UNIX (and derivatives).

Any "CS student" who "simply doesn't care about Windows" should be ashamed to call themselves such. Mindless bias like that has no place in academia.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Nicolay77]

Not really, six months before the release of Vista, I remember seeing Dell and other retailers still selling computers with 256MB of RAM (in newspaper ads and fliers, in my country).

So Windows stagnated, and vendors did what they knew best: use the cheaper parts around.

The 3-4GHz barrier in processor speeds did not help that much either.

Then it came Vista and the Core2Duo and things changed.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

I'm sorry but how can anyone seriously argue that "our program is bloated, but it's OK because relatively decent hardware can handle it!" with a straight face.

Because the only logical conclusion to the opposing argument is an abacus.

If you have to argue that your bloat is acceptable, then it's too bloated.

People who can still do their work on a DOS 3.3 machine would argue Linux is incredibly bloated. Would you agree with them ?

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[incripshin]

You cannot easily study closed operating systems. Open operating systems are meant to be studied. Since Windows is a moving target, it's even more difficult to come up with accurate information on it. The Windows design concerns nobody but Microsoft.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nevesis]

Linux is a family of operating systems. The kernel isn't bloated, and there are Linux operating systems that require 8MB of RAM or less. There are no bloat-free versions of Vista. If Vista was modular and I could remove components, I would have no problem with the bloat. Alas..

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[RobertM1968]

I'd address all the points in detail, but obviously that is a waste of time.

So, let's first tackle this one - amortization over 3 years... that wasnt my idea - it was yours - and what way would you suggest other than via credit card? Perhaps you just dont understand the meaning as it applies to a consumer.

As for a video card... ever run Vista on an integrated Intel chipset? Even Microsoft's internal memos suggested against certifying that video chipset for anything Vista - Aero or not. That accounts for a very large amount of HP and Compaq machines - and that doesnt even begin to touch the sub-standard or marginal chipsets they used in numerous of their AMD based systems. Thus, making my point valid and yours ridiculous yet again.

As for "no one being forced to upgrade to Vista" - that too was your premise - not mine. This thread wasnt about people being forced to do anything - it was about your premise which was people upgrading and how little it cost via amortization. Perhaps you should have read your post again before you responded since you obviously forgot what you wrote - or perhaps I should have quoted each section in my original response to help remind you of what you wrote.

As for antivirus, while Symantec and McAfee have been happily updating NAV2006 and McAfee 2006, they haven't been upgrading it. Yet 90% of the later XP machines out there came with one or the other, and numerous people are still running and updating (not upgrading) them.

That aspect aside, once you install Vista, you need to reinstall the AV software anyway... from what disks? Cant use the (virtually non-existant) upgrade to a newer version method either since the qualifying product (the OEM installed version) no longer exists... so yes, someone who upgraded to Vista will in all likelihood be purchasing new AV software.

As for mobos without IDE ports, I have actually very recently purchased quite a few that are either all SATA or have only one IDE port - and if you know anything about computers, you know that you dont want to attach that IDE optical drive on the same cable as that IDE hard drive... ooops! What do you do then? Yeah, you can do it - but with as much as Vista uses the disk for swapping crap in and out of the pagefile, is it really smart?

It is very amazing that various of my responses that you "countered", you pretended that the issue was something I brought up - when you are the one who brought it up (ie: upgrading to Vista, amortization, etc).

The sad thing is, as a technician (and morals aside) I am happy with this situation... it keeps me working. People who upgrade to Vista keep coming in for upgrades for hardware that either doesnt work (no drivers) or doesnt work well enough (lack of memory, crappy video card, etc). I actually feel sad about the situation - but someone is gonna make the money bringing the systems up to date... so I dont turn the customers away - and they leave happier than their experiences with BestBuy and Circuit City (not that that's tough to accomplish) and save some money to boot. Heck, as it is, we get quite a few calls for people who bought out-of-the-box-Vista machines who need upgrades because their systems only came with 512MB or 1GB - or had an onboard Intel video chipset.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

You cannot easily study closed operating systems.

Sure you can. There's more than enough documentation to study the design of Windows NT in an "OS course".

Open operating systems are meant to be studied. Since Windows is a moving target, it's even more difficult to come up with accurate information on it.

Windows is no more a "moving target" than Linux is. Less, if anything - its internals have changed far less over the last ~15 years than Linux's has.

The Windows design concerns nobody but Microsoft.

The Windows design should concern anyone who purports to have an interest in Operating Systems.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Linux is a family of operating systems. The kernel isn't bloated, and there are Linux operating systems that require 8MB of RAM or less.

Unbelievably bloated. DOS 3.3 would run on a machine with half a megabyte of RAM.

There are no bloat-free versions of Vista. If Vista was modular and I could remove components, I would have no problem with the bloat. Alas..

Sure you would. You'd just be able to remove it. Which exposes the colossal arrogance of your position - it's only "bloat" because _you_ don't think it's a worthwhile feature. In the context of systems with equivalents features - say, OS X - Vista isn't bloated. You need similar hardware to get similar results.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

I won't say that Linux never crashes, just that it is easier to repair. Even if the average user can't repair it, someone else can.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ickoonite]

And the argument about being 5 years late is a little misleading. Yes, it's true, but Vista is not the same OS they were working on for most of that time. They were a bit ambitious, and effectively killed off the real "longhorn" in late 2005. Then they started over and the Vista today is really only about 2 years or work. Maybe in irrelevant point, but the "they had 5 years to get it right" argument is equally irrelelvant.

But it's not irrelevant. Just because they fucked it up three years in doesn't mean it doesn't count. It's true that because of the fuck-up, Vista does indeed represent only about two years of (lackadaisical) work, but at the end of the day, it was still the first consumer OS to come out of Redmond after XP, some five-six years later.

And in any case, it's a pretty poor show that a company with the resources that Microsoft has couldn't deliver "the real Longhorn", as you put it. I can't help but look at the elegant solutions that, for example, Apple has engineered and wonder why Microsoft, with all the talent it can and does recruit, can't do the same.

:|

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

I can do my own repairs, thank you very much.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[IntlHarvester]

Then why did you bring up the cost? Windows has its problems, but face it, Linux ain't cheap to support either.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nevesis]

What a ridiculous comparison. DOS 3.3 was developed over 20 years ago, these Linux distributions (Tiny Linux, ttylinux, arch, basic linux, etc) are relatively modern, and some are still actively developed. And you're partially right - it is bloat because I don't think it's a worthwhile "feature". The problem is.. most people agree with me.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[colinrichardday]

As I can do my own repairs, it doesn't cost much. And what evidence do you have that Linux is costly to support? At least the OS isn't deliberately obfuscated.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[dbIII]

But not using the same drivers, obviously. Amazing how when you take out the component where the problem is, the problem disappears, isn't it ?

Drivers are not hardware. Above the hardware was pointed out for blame.

The driver model is defined by Microsoft and allows mapping of memory into the space that renders PAE useless which means the driver model is the problem. Furthurmore I am very suprised and disappointed that the problem did not go away with Vista, a slightly different driver model and driver certification.

Arguing that Microsoft is not responsible for defining core components of their operating systems is a little odd.

Personally I hope we'll be seeing more 64 bit software so we can abandon their 32 bit platforms and just forget about it - for the moment now we're stuck using disk for virtual memory for some applications due to this flaw.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[man_of_mr_e]

What you see is the result of ambitious thinking without sufficient research. Apple had it's own failures for years. Pink, Copeland, Taligent, etc..

The problem comes in when you publicize features before you've even built prototypes. Before you've proven that you can do what you plan to do.

Another problem is that most hardware hit a brick wall between 2001 and 2007. CPU's basically stopped getting faster, though they did get a bit more efficient. Then the whole multi-core thing happened. I think Microsoft pland on 5Ghz processors and Video Cards well beyond what we have when they started.

None of this is an excuse, they seriously misstepped, but I don't think any of their assumptions were unreasonable at the time, just a bad confluence of events combined with ambitious goals and a lack of course correction until it was too late.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[vuffi_raa]

Windows costs a "small fortune" is utter absurdity. I disagree- you need to look at it more like this- with the price of hardware having dropped and systems as a whole what they are (I just built a system recently for my GF that in total cost for OEM parts came to about $450) and competing operating system costs (linux- free, osx roughly $100) the retail price of vista ultimate @ $400 is obscene - the same price as building an entire system with linux or 4X the price of osx-
let me put this another way- the average houshold income is approx. $2810 per month after taxes 50% is $1405 which is the average cost of housing per month- knock that $405 off for food and energy costs and you have a thousand dollars left(this is not counting gas and transport)- so what microsoft is basically saying by pricing at $400 is that they think that they are worth roughly 40% of an a monthly household's expendable income as a purchase- I don't think many families would agree

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[wwphx]

I just wish Time Machine was a little bit more intelligent. I would like a little more in the way of options, so that I could tell it to snapshot once per day, rather than every 10 minutes like it does.

One of these days I'll have another system with a terabyte of storage on my lan that I can leave our laptops to back up to more or less endlessly.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[networkBoy]

http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/70157/Offer_and_Dell_Recommend_HDCP_Compliant_Video_Cards
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/hardware/hdcp-vista.ars
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6286245.stm

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[darkpixel2k]

the cost per day only goes up to $0.61 per day.

Maybe Microsoft's marketing droids could use that. You could run your computer everyday for less than a cup of coffee. That actually makes it sounds good.

...although...

My kid is only 2 and is starting to get the hang of using the mouse...I'm guessing he'll be needing a computer of his own around 5. My grandfather is somewhere around 80 and still using his computer... So if I take those two (very rough and non-scientific) values and come up with 75 years of computer use, you can expect to pay $16,698.75 for a lifetime of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office from your costs of $0.61 per day. It also looks like it could be a bit less if you follow the upgrade path. Of course it doesn't take into account things like inflation or Microsoft missing a shipping deadline by a few years.

Of course my house has been running Linux for the last 3 years. My software costs are still $0. That $16k could buy me some nice shiny new hardware.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Thalagyrt]

I just consider myself extremely lucky, because in other cases I've seen them take a while to boot, but my machines seem to be an exception.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[JeepFanatic]

Shadow Copy is available as a download for XP too - has been for a number of years now.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[_xeno_]

It's not the same thing - Microsoft helpfully reused the name. Technically Shadow Copy is just the NTFS feature that the Previous Versions feature uses to access previous versions. And persistent Shadow Copy wasn't added until Windows Server 2003 - the Shadow Copy feature in XP only allows access to locked files for backup purposes. At least, according to the Wikipedia and this technet article.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Abcd1234]

Well, I think you're both mis-stating things, here. First off, it's clear there was something wrong with the GP's installation. That said, the fact that it takes 40 seconds to get to a login screen in Vista is essentially meaningless. Ask yourself: how long does it take to log in, and for the desktop to reach a useable state? My T61 easily takes a good 2 or 3 minutes (at least) to settle down and become useable. Why? Because Vista presents the login screen before the system is actually completely up and running. It makes things *seem* faster, sure, but the reality is it takes a good while before the machine is really ready to be used.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Thalagyrt]

About 10-15 seconds after login it's good to go. It's a fairly stripped down and pretty damn powerful pro audio workstation I put together. I don't have any tray apps/etc running or anything that'd bog down post-login loading.

The laptops are a slightly different story, but in total including post login all three of them are about a minute from power button to working usable desktop.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Allador]

No a piece of software can be fixed but saying it needs to mature implies it's immature and thus not ready.

Did you not read the paragraph you quoted? I listed all the things that change that are involved with a software product (especially an operating system) maturing. Drivers are huge. Third party software adapting to changes in the OS is huge. Resellers figuring out how to build a more stable distro is huge (you do realize that resellers heavily customize the distribution of windows, right? and that MS has no say over that, right?). Lastly, IT professionals learn the tricks and traps around using and managing the OS.

All of these things are factual things that happen. Most of them directly impact the stability, functionality of the system from the end-users perspective, and from that perspective are just all parts of the OS.

Are you seriously suggesting that there is no maturation of the ecosystem around OS's that affects their stability and functionality? If so, I'd like to hear some specific responses to the things I outlined above, about how they do not in fact have an effect.

There is more to a car than the steering wheel and gear shift. Secondly, programming plays a major part of car design these days.

Programming does play a part, but its much simpler in scope. In particular, a key element is that its a fixed system. You dont have other people randomly adding other software elements to it that it must be expected to work with. (yes, there are 3rd party chipping systems, but there is no expectation from the car maker that these things are supported, and the chip vendors often have to do major reverse engineering work to get them functional).

In fact some cars run Windows if MS can supposedly get it right for the car then why not at home?

The cars dont 'run' windows, as in that windows has anything to do with the functionality of the car. It's all ancillary stuff like radio, navigation, phone, etc. And that windows version is a heavily modified, stripped down version that *gasp* is highly limited to the platforms it will run on.

Exactly, when a car does fowl up on a massive scale it's taken off the market. That's not the case with an OS and an OS isn't just something you play around with.

A car is taken off the market if and only if either 1) the car manufacturer decides that a recall is less expensive than individual lawsuits and repairs, or 2) a gov agency demands it.

However, OS's can be patched much easier. Some car/recall situations do get 'patched' in that you are instructed to take your car into a dealer and they make a modification.

The bar to take something off the market though is fairly high. It has to either actively injure/hurt/kill people or their tangible property, or cause problems on such a massive scale that its disruptive to society.

Despite the /. blather, this is not even remotely the case here. The problems resulting from installs is, from everything I can see, a tiny proportion of the population. However, every nut can make a blog, so this kind of stuff gets big press now. In all seriousness, you could have this level of news if only 100 people had this problem.

This isn't something that should just be released in a half assed manner by a company that takes zero responsibility for what it does.

I think you underestimate the complexity of the issue here. The number of permutations that could be present on a machine is nearly infinite. You cant test an infinite number of things. Especially when OEMs are able to cause their own set of problems with their custom distributions.

Of course it should translate into better products. You have more money than anyone else. You should then be able to buy the best programmers, you should be able to have a huge testing facility and just on those two factors alone means you produce something better than some small timer.

I

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Reziac]

People howled a lot less when Windows cost $35 than when it costs $350.

At $40, I expect an adequate OS and can forgive the occasional glitch.

At $400, considering that the cost of other consumer-level software has NOT gone up by a factor of 10, I expect a bloody PERFECT OS with absolutely NO glitches.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[ickoonite]

At $400, considering that the cost of other consumer-level software has NOT gone up by a factor of 10, I expect a bloody PERFECT OS with absolutely NO glitches.

Indeed - your point about inflation is spot on, and is something that is often overlooked. People complain about the ridiculous number of versions of Vista and complain about the price, but I think they forget just how ridiculous the price now actually is.

I think that if one were to pay a sum more commensurate with the perceived value of the software (and commensurate with the apparent level of effort that went into its production), $40 sounds like quite a nice sum. Hell, I might even buy a copy of Windows for $40.

:|

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

People howled a lot less when Windows cost $35 than when it costs $350.

When did Windows cost $35 ? Windows 3.1 had a retail price of $150.

Which, in today's dollars, is about $240. Add on the cost of DOS 5.0 ($100) adjusted for inflation ($160) and you get to $400.

So, in real terms, Windows Vista "Ultimate" costs as much today as DOS+Windows 3.1 did in 1992. Taking into account a) the massive increase in actual functionality and b) cheaper versions of Vista, it's quite clear that, far from being "expensive", Windows is - comparatively - "cheap".

At $400, considering that the cost of other consumer-level software has NOT gone up by a factor of 10 [...]

By no rational measure whatsoever, has the price of Windows gone up by a factor of 10. Windows Vista "Home Basic" - a more reasonable modern comparison to DOS+Windows 3.11, has a retail price of $200. In other words, in real terms Windows has halved in price since 1992.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Drivers are not hardware. Above the hardware was pointed out for blame.

No, both hardware and software were blamed.

The driver model is defined by Microsoft and allows mapping of memory into the space that renders PAE useless which means the driver model is the problem. Furthurmore I am very suprised and disappointed that the problem did not go away with Vista, a slightly different driver model and driver certification.

Microsoft can define the driver model, but they can't make people follow it properly (well, they can, but look at the shitstorm and conspiracy theories when they try).

Arguing that Microsoft is not responsible for defining core components of their operating systems is a little odd.

I'm not. I'm arguing they're not responsible when hardware vendors write shitty drivers, or don't bother to test them with machines using PAE (although given the scarcity of machines running in PAE mode, it is somewhat excusable for vendors targeting their products at the consumer market).

Personally I hope we'll be seeing more 64 bit software so we can abandon their 32 bit platforms and just forget about it - for the moment now we're stuck using disk for virtual memory for some applications due to this flaw.

I'm not sure why you think 64 bit removes the need to use disk for virtual memory. Many of my Linux machines are using gigabytes of swap, even though they are running in x64 mode and have 32G of real RAM in them.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Reziac]

I don't know where you saw Win3.1 at that price. The typical retail price that I saw, back in the day, was about $35-$50 tops. I sure like where I shopped better than where you shopped. :)

Even at $150, the price would still be about 10% that of the average consumer-grade PC of the day.

Now, the OS is priced at 50% to 100% of the price of the average consumer-grade PC. Something's wrong with this pricing, inflation and Moore's Law and all. Do you really feel that the OS is HALF the value of your machine?

Also, historically, M$ stock did well (roughly doubling in value every year) up until XP and activation and price confusion. Since then, it's been flat. One can't help but consider a correlation.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Timothy Chu]

I'd say in the case of the Dell machines, it's Dell who has to test it. Not Microsoft. I work in the software industry, and I know slapping on "compatible with Vista" is stating more about our software's compatibility with the platform than Microsoft's approval of that software. I'm fairly certain that the same goes for hardware. The hardware vendor (Dell) probably just needs to go through a bunch of checklists, and if their hardware works according to that checklist, they get certified. Because of the size of Dell, they probably have some clout and can influence MS to fix certain things, but generally, you're buying a Dell when you buy the PC, not Microsoft.

For the car example, it's more like a highway having a sign saying it's been tested with Prius', rather than Toyota saying it works on all highways.

As for software vendors taking legal responsibility, many of them do...so long as you pay them accordingly. If you run an accounting business and have a contract with your software vendors, they have a legal obligation to fix the bugs that undermine your business. Even MS has service contracts you can purchase to get this level of service.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

I don't know where you saw Win3.1 at that price. The typical retail price that I saw, back in the day, was about $35-$50 tops. I sure like where I shopped better than where you shopped. :)

That was the Windows 3.1 recommended retail price. Your $40ish copies were probably OEM versions.

Now, the OS is priced at 50% to 100% of the price of the average consumer-grade PC. Something's wrong with this pricing, inflation and Moore's Law and all. Do you really feel that the OS is HALF the value of your machine?

Except "nobody" pays full retail price for Windows. The vast, vast majority "pay" however much their OEM has negotiated when they get a new PC. Of the few people who actually buy Windows, most of them buy upgrade versions or "retail OEM" versions.

In short, the price comparison you present is silly, because it's utterly unrealistic.

Further, OSes today have significantly functional improvements over those sold back in the early '90s. This is in contrast to the hardware, which offers next to no functional improvements (networking is the only one that springs to mind - maybe sound and 3D accleration, depending on how you're counting), and is basically just a lot faster and bigger than it used to be.

Also, historically, M$ stock did well (roughly doubling in value every year) up until XP and activation and price confusion. Since then, it's been flat. One can't help but consider a correlation.

Yeah, I'm sure that was completely due to Windows XP. The whole tech market meltdown thing wouldn't have had any impact at all.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sandbags]

OS X 10.1 added a ton of new feature (149 of them to be exact, to OS 10.0. It was billed as an incremental upgrade, not as a new OS.

10.5 added over 350 new features to OS 10.4, and over 100 of the features were evident to users and added new, never before available, functionality.

XP's list of new features beyond Windows 2K was in fact extensive, but more than 80% of those featuered had been retroactively added to 2K with it's own SP3, or were features like Windows Medial PLayer or other bundled software packages that since they were "included" with XP, they were listed as features, but every one of them could be installed, ofr free, under Win 2K.

XP SP2 was more of an OS upgrade than XP itself was over 2K. There were actually more features realeased in SP2 for XP that could not be added to 2K than XP released on day 1 over 2K. Check your release notes more carefully instead of reading the headlines...

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sandbags]

Easily run as non-admin??? Every XP machine I have in my house, and nearly every corportate PC installed in America runs as a non-admin user. It may not be obvious to the idiots who buy some cheap ass PoS underpowered hunk at Circuit City that they're supposed to create a non-admin user and use that for daily tasks, but it's by no means difficult!

Sure, local policy will prevent you from doing a lot of things an admin could, like editing the registry, accessing some admin only control panels (unless you happen to know the comand line for them), changing critical system setting, etc. But you can allways make a shortcut to whatever app you want to run, even a control panel icon, right click it, set the "run as" flag, and it will politely promt you for an account name and password and allow you to work as that user for that 1 application. You can even make a shortcut that does that automatically, without the prompt, by adding a few strings to it;s comand line execute. This is even better than running "su -" since it only applies to that 1 application, not the entire session, and I don't have to remember to un-assume root.

In Vista, I may not be running as "admin", but I can do anyting an admin can do by simply clicking "allow" I don't even need a password! That's not running as a user with restrictions and accounting for manual override, that's an admin account with pop-up warnings that most users will become accustomed to and just click allow without reading anyway...

Although 2.4.x and 2.6.x kernels are very similar on the surface, the underlying code has advanced continually. But let;s have a real comparrison, because 2.6 is like XP SP2 compared to 2.4, it's an enhancement, not a new OS... Lets look at 1.6 compared to 2.4, or KDE 4 compared to Gnome 3. THAT's an OS upgrade... Keep in mind, Apple's Aqua runs on top of a BSD kernel that's more than 12 years old, but if you look at their opern source kernel code under the darwin project, it looks NOTHING like it used to. Also keep in mind that although a LOT of core code changes from kernel to kernel, it has to remain compatible with the hundreds of protocols and cross OS communcation standards set forth by OSI, TIA, IEEE, and a dozen other agencies. Where would Windows be without the TCP/IP stack, Kerberos, SSH, Radius, HTTP? Not a single one of these is a microsoft protocol. Even USB was INVENTED BY APPLE!

The kernel is about internal process tracking, thread management, memory management, Security audits, window management, basic GUI and OSI layer interactions. That was almost completely re-written for Vista. Sure, they called it NT 6, but that's just habbit. Are you perhaps indicating on ANY level that NT 3.12 has ANY similarity to NT 4.0???? How many drivers for XP work in NT 4.0? ...only the ones that are actually NT native and use calls also supported in XP, but if they use hardware level support not available to NT (USB 2.0, Bluetooth), it can't be made to work. The Kernel (NTOSkrnl) doesn't support it...

If vista was so much the same, why do virtually NONE of the XP drivers work with it? Why can't DX 10 be back ported to XP, it's only software afterall, right? Why can't Aero be added to XP? Why can't HDCP and Blue-Ray BD+ be added to XP? Well, it can, but it would require a MAJOR kernel rewrite, and break 10s of thousands of applications and drivers. Yes, the day to day functionality is much the same, to the end user. Look at your OSI model again and see how much that actually doesn't matter a lick to the application code, kernel, hardware and transport layers beneath it. You can run different GUIs with the same kernel (Aqua, KDE, Gnome, etc) but you can't run different kernels necessarily with the same GUI. Windows stays the same becuase people won't buy it if they have to learn it all over again. That doesn't mean it's not an all new engine in the same 4 wheeled vehicle. Ask a Mopar guy to fix your hybrid and see how far he gets... It's a car, right?

Oh Yes It Will

[RupW]

Note that XP3 won't install on systems running beta IE8 It won't be offered automatically by Windows Update but it *will* install. However you then can't remove IE8 without ininstalling the service pack first.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[nqz]

Also, the summary is misleading. If you downgrade to IE6 *before* installing SP3, then you'll be able to install and uninstall IE7 at will, after installing SP3.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[Anomolous Cowturd]

So if you jump through a whole lot of bizarre flaming hoops before installing the upgrade, you should be ok. Could MS be trying to kill off XP for some strange reason?

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[Amiralul]

Funny how, on the official IE7 page, there is no option yet to download IE7 for XPSP3.
I've installed SP3 offline, over my SP2, but there was no IE7 with it.
But it's ok, IE6 is doing fine over here, not stressing him to much since the Mozilla launched Firefox.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[ShieldW0lf]

They were hoping to get everyone to pay for their Trusted Computing screwjob. But people didn't want to pay, so now they're getting screwed for free. That's good value!

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[MillionthMonkey]

I never installed IE7, so I've already avoided one flaming hoop right there already. Since I still have IE6, if I were to update to SP3 I wouldn't have to uninstall IE7 to get to XP SP3 + IE6 nirvana, so I avoid a second flaming hoop. It's more like a straightforward descent into hell with no annoying hoops in the way.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[Hyppy]

The reason for this is the way that IE7's uninstall procedures occur, and the fact that SP3 works for computers with both IE6 and IE7.

When you install IE7, it creates a backup of all IE6-related files that it replaces, in order to replace them if the user uninstalls IE7.

When you upgrade to SP3, it replaces files that are used by both IE6 and IE7, most of which have different versions depending on which browser is currently being installed.

If you were to uninstall IE7 after updating to SP3, then it will revert to the pre-SP3 binaries that were copied during initial setup.

Now, I agree that the SP3 setup should be intelligent enough to identify and replace IE6 files located in the IE7 uninstall folder, but honestly it was probably a very low priority.

The fix? Uninstall IE7, install SP3, then re-install IE7. Not an easily automated task, but thats what needs to be done if you want to be able to uninstall IE7 in order to revert to IE6 in the future.

Either way, its not a massive conspiracy. You can put your tin-foil hat away today.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[jonwil]

What I want to know is why they didnt just make IE7 a mandatory part of SP3 in much the same way as IE got the security improvements in XP SP2 (firewall, pop-up blocker etc)

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[thetoadwarrior]

People who stick with broken browsers, like IE6, should be shot. It's people like you that make web development more of a pain than it needs to be. :P

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[bill_kress]

Wow, after reading some of the posts on this system, I have to downgrade windows in my personal OS tracker.

It used to be more maintainable than Linux, less than OS/X, but now you really can't claim that it's any easier to maintain than Linux with the Vista problems we've had in the past year.

In fact, if you were to run Ubuntu and install every single update (there are plenty) I don't think you would have run into half the problems.

Also, I see a lot of Mac laptops around me. Since coming to Portland, I've seen more Macs than PCs (in Spokane WA it was like 2 macs for 5 PCs, here it is more like 6 macs for 5 pcs, and if you just count laptops it's more like two to three times as many.

The people you see with the laptops, these are the hard-core that are going to be helping their parents, friends and children to choose their next PC. It takes a while, but businesses are following too. When I walk from the max to work, as I glance into windows, I see quite a few offices running macs now.

Although you don't hear it from the media, maybe Windows is finally ambling towards the elephant graveyard looking for it's old friend PS/2.

I hate to hope, but between this and Obama, I may actually have to become slightly less pessimistic.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[MillionthMonkey]

People who stick with broken browsers, like IE6, should be shot. It's people like you that make web development more of a pain than it needs to be. :P

You mean people who test their work on IE6?

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[nahdude812]

I keep IE 6 running in my VirtualBox instance of XP. If a site works in IE 6, it almost certainly works in IE 7. The converse is not true, and since I have testing to do, that's a safer platform to test on.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[nahdude812]

Because of big business. Big business demands to run fully-patched software, but also demands that software not be upgraded before every application the business users use has been tested with it.

Most big business upgrade cycle is 2-5 years behind cutting edge. We got XP last year.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[jawtheshark]

Have you ever considered that there are XP users that use Firefox and don't see a need to upgrade to IE7 because they don't use IE6. I have IE6 on my XP SP2 systems and see no reason to upgrade to IE7. I don't use it.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[thetoadwarrior]

If you don't use it then why does it matter if you upgrade or not?

I fail to see your logic because, as a FF user on my Windows machine, I also realise that certain programs, like Steam use IE and sometimes you, unfortunately, have to use IE which is why FF has a view in IE add-on. So why not use the more secure version? It's not like it'll affect the performance of the machine.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[jawtheshark]

Well, it takes up space on my machine. Also, I'm pretty strict on these things: if a website requires IE, then I will not give it my business. It's that simple. Are you sure Steam uses IE? When I installed it on wine on Debian, it wanted the gecko engine which really isn't IE at all.

Also, upgrades of browsers really tend to "take over" the machine. I set Firefox default, and I like it that way. IE7 is surely going to set itself back to default browser and as such I'll have to revert that. Thanks, but no thanks.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[thetoadwarrior]

That is true but if it's a business site you should test both because IE7 still has quirks and can't necessarily be fixed the same way as in IE6. It's over taking IE6 at a decent pace, imo.

At the rate our users appear to be converting to IE7, I'm hoping to pretty much forget about IE6 by the end of the year.

Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[Ancient_Hacker]

In the movie V.I. Warshawski , Kathleen Turner is some sort of hit-woman. Her catch phrase, something like "Sure I've killed a few dozen people, but that's insignificant compared to the population".

One could make a similar statement about SP3.

Not that I'm a MS fan-boy, far from it.

Déjà vu?

[Corporate Troll]

Sooooo? Is there going to be an SP3a?

Re:Déjà vu?

[notnAP]

Yeah... I'm not going anywhere near SP3 until it's in SP1, at least.

Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[TheMeuge]

It may be paranoia, but I am considering that given the welcome that Vista has received, Microsoft had no choice but to do this. Producing two OSs that compete with one another is insanity... especially when the product that's winning is not the latest one.

So the solution is fairly obvious - if you can't improve Vista, you can make XP worse. That way, people know they're going to be dissatisfied with your product from the get-go, but at least they'll buy the latest one.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[schnikies79]

Just because some people are having problems doesn't mean everyone is. I'm 8 for 8 and every machine is solid as a rock.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[DAldredge]

What is so bad about Vista?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Broken Toys]

Let me spell it out for you, D-R-M.

Over half an hour to do a simple file copy from Vista to my MP3 player of choice. Same process takes less than five minutes with W2K, XP, and - dare I say it? - Linux.

Life is too short to waste it waiting for Vista to complete a simple file copy.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[wITTus]

It's new and from Microsoft. And there are several other not so important technical reasons.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Kalriath]

Strange, that same file copy in Vista takes me a couple of minutes - maybe it was just fucked on your PC?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[thermian]

I have a vista machine at home, connected to my network, with SP1 installed. I did a file copy this morning of a 40mb folder containing about 50 files.

4 minutes, start to finish, half of that time was spent just 'calculating time remaining' with no actual copying going on.

If it had said 'checking the files to make sure you're not a filthy, filthy pirate', I would at least understand what was going on. Their current message makes them look even worse.

The same copy operation, XP machine to XP machine takes just seconds.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[harry666t]

Well... Dunno. It doesn't sell? People demand XP?

Customers voted with their wallets, that's all.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Hoi Polloi]

Installed SP3, reboot, no problems (so far).

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[mgblst]

Well, judging by your sig, I think that you may run across some reasons before, on why most of us here hate Vista. So lets not rehash that old argument again.

Maybe you should ask, what is so good about Vista?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Aphoxema]

Well, from what we've seen out of Microsoft so far, how ridiculous would it be for them to sabotage one flagship product to sell another?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[dlapine]

DRM infestation:

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?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[geekoid]

It doesn't preform as well as XP, it has issue with certain MS legacy apps/Tools, requires expensive upgrades, and it's not mature.

Installing an OS that is new is foolish.

All this is based on our labs work in the Vista test bed. So yes, I actually have proof and we did actual testing.
Don't you dare compare me to me that have no evidence to back up there claim, no falsifiable tests, and refuse to even attempt to understand the science involved in geology, evolution, and radio dating.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Anonymous Coward]

No DRM is involved with file copying. Really it isn't. File copying was slow in Vista for a variety of reasons, most of which arefixed in SP1.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[alx5000]

My experience so far:

    - Can't connect to eduroam (mixed WPA2+AES & WPA+TKIP... I can choose which one to use in Ubuntu, but Vista just won't connect). Actually, I can hardly connect to open and WEPped access points.
    - Explorer windows are annoying and hard to understand (where's my "Go up" button?)
    - Configuring _anything_ is hard as hell. The interface tends to remind the user of the previous Windows versions', but the process is almost completely different.
    - So many [cripped] flavors (Why shouldn't I be able to edit the system's security policy just because I'm using Home Premium? It took me an hour and a half to get my Vista machine to talk to Samba)
    - UAC (thank god you can easily disable it, but what kind of security model is that? I spent my first couple of hours clicking accept buttons away).

And I must have booted it about 10 times in more than a month (and because of a couple of apps that won't run under Wine). And I won't downgrade to XP until I can find the proper audio drivers for my card (a friend of mine is on a permanent hunt for them, both of us have HP laptops).

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[matazar]

Yeah, I've installed SP3 on 8 systems now. 1 gave issues (I decided it was because it was a pos clone) the rest worked flawlessly.
It's funny that anything problem with windows is turned into a bash fest but when apple product go wrong with the same sort of thing (updates fucking the system up) people tend to just ignore it.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Mister Whirly]

Shhh! No fair bringing reality into the Microsoft bash fest!

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[HeronBlademaster]

I haven't had any issues with SP3... except that now Visual Studio 2008 completely freezes once in a while (somewhere in its intellisense component), and Counter-Strike: Source crashes far more often.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[DAldredge]

Why doesn't this 'DRM' stop me from playing my media collection?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[nine-times]

If that's true at all, and Microsoft were to purposefully sabotage Windows XP, it would be incredibly stupid of them. Microsoft may be annoyed that people want to stick with XP, but at least it doesn't disturb the whole vendor lock-in they have going on. However, if you make people dissatisfied with both Windows XP and Vista, and people might just jump-ship to OSX/Linux.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Blakey Rat]

Admittedly I haven't read those links, but so far I've not encountered any DRM in Vista apart from the normal product activation that was also in XP. Since every time I ask for details about the DRM, I get modded down by someone, I'm inclined just to dismiss the "Vista has loads of DRM!" crap as just another Slashdot myth, like "Microsoft Shills".

Please reply with a *specific* example of a task I can't accomplish with Vista because of DRM. Something I can reproduce on my own. And I might start believing these claims.

broken sound API's (change for change sake)

It's so broken that all of my software works just fine! It's so horribly broken that it has a lot more features than the old sound system (like allowing me to change volume per-program)!

I think you need to look up "broken" in a dictionary.

Lack of drivers for older hardware

That one I'll give you.

Useless on older machines with just 512 MB of RAM

Have you tried it? It works fine on machines with 512 MB of RAM. I would recommend switching the theme to the Classic theme, since your 512 MB computer probably doesn't have much video RAM either. But that has nothing to do with Vista being useless. Perhaps "slightly less useful."

In fact, you should also look up "useless" in a dictionary.

too many versions

The problem isn't that there's too many, it's how Microsoft delineated them.

For example, I want to use Media Center, and I want to use Remote Desktop. Because of the way the versions are set out, the *only* way to get that combination is to buy Ultimate edition.

Another example: for some strange reason, the best advanced backup tools (shadow copy and the new backup tool) are in the Business edition, and not available in the Home editions. But businesses are (generally speaking) a lot more likely to have good backup tools in place compared to home users. I don't know Microsoft's rationale behind that decision, but it seems completely backwards.

Microsoft either needed to go all the way and make all the features "ala cart", or produce a single edition with everything in it.

SP1 released just last month

And...?

As someone already mentioned, MS has 2 OS's in competition, and the newer one is losing.

Only on Slashdot. If you look at adoption rates, you'll see Vista is doing just fine. It's already 10% of the market (as told by website logs), and growing. That means Vista has gone from nothing, to the number 2 most popular OS in a year and a half. If Linux or the next release of OS X had managed that feat, they wouldn't be called "losing."

Why is it surprising that they would provide a "fix" to XP that makes it less desirable?

Because service packs have never done that in the past. XP SP1 and SP2 both added much improved security features and numerous bug fixes, and nothing that would make XP less desirable.

Let's face it- they could have put out SP3 at any time in the last three years, and should have.

Last three years might be exaggerating a bit, but it definitely could have come out a year ago. I think that Microsoft was keeping their QA and release staffs on Vista until it was completely out the door before switching them to working on XP SP3, or having them work on both simultaneously. Microsoft has a lot of staff, but they don't have infinite resources.

In short, unless you're in the Microsoft Windows group and have a lot of insider knowledge the rest of us don't, I don't see how you can possibly decree that Microsoft "could have" put SP3 out years ago. (Most likely, this being Slashdot, you're simply making it up.)

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?

Don't make the mistake of confusing a few whiny users with a significant proportion of the HP/AMD-using population. These scary stories come out for every Service Pack, every time they come out, and it always amounts to just a couple of people.

While we're at it, don't make the mistake of taking any Slashdot posting at face value, especially Slashdot postings about Microsoft.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[harry666t]

Wow, 140,000,000,000,000 copies is indeed great success. Who they've been selling to? Bacteria?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Cairnarvon]

Only on Slashdot. If you look at adoption rates, you'll see Vista is doing just fine. It's already 10% of the market (as told by website logs), and growing. That means Vista has gone from nothing, to the number 2 most popular OS in a year and a half. If Linux or the next release of OS X had managed that feat, they wouldn't be called "losing."

People keep saying that, but really, how much of that is due to monopoly abuse on the part of Microsoft by strong-arming vendors into no longer carrying XP, or at least hiding the fact that they do? Every single person I know who uses Vista only uses it because the place they got their new computer at wouldn't give them Windows XP.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[MikeFM]

It'd be more efficient to list the features that aren't so bad.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[dlapine]

Read the white paper, look at the load Vista puts on all hardware operations to enforce DRM. Everything you do on Vista is slower so that MS can "protect" DRM files, even when you are using them, or have no intention to do so.

Sure, the DRM infestation on Vista doesn't break things if you personally have no DRM "equipped" media- no itunes, no netflicks, etc. But you still get the overhead and consequent slowdown.

The change in sound API (Application Programming Interface) and the underlying sound models means that the older sound cards won't work without updated drivers. Creative sound card owners get screwed as the sound hardware (DSP) on the card that they already paid for isn't utilized, because the DRM on Vista can't trust it.

Sorry, I should have been more clear- Vista is useless on older hardware that only supports 512 MB of ram. You know, those 3 & 4 year old systems most people are using. Yes, I've used vista on low end Dell with just 512 of ram, and it took minutes just to open menus. Completely unuseable. On a brand new dual core with 512MB, it might be acceptable, I dunno.

Most experienced Windows users and 95% of businesses (that being a large portion of MS installs) wouldn't touch a new MS OS until SP1. As SP1 only has been out a month, that implies that it's had about 1 month of testing by the people who need it work, and aren't just playing games with it. I get paid to work with bleeding edge HPC systems- I just want my home PC to run well.

If you already have 85-90% of the market with your current OS, I wouldn't be crowing about your new OS getting to just 10% of the market, given that it's been released to the general public for over 15 months. Here's what businesses (the largest part of MS sales remember) are doing:

By December 2007, only 6.3% of enterprise users working in Windows reported that they were on Vista, according to Forrester. Although that was an increase from only 0.7% in January 2007, Windows XP's share didn't move during the year: It started 2007 at 89.5% of all Windows users and ended at 89.8%. It appears that Vista made headway only at the expense of the even older Windows 2000, Iqbal said. "Vista's increase mirrored the decrease in Windows 2000," he said. "The statistics speak for themselves: They're holding on to XP." http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9073540&pageNumber=2

In the past, when MS released SP1 & SP2 for XP, they weren't competing with themselves.

Microsoft has a lot of staff, but they don't have infinite resources. You're joking right? Microsoft has cash reserves of over $40 billion, and in today's IT world, that's as close to infinite as it gets. If MS felt the need to so, hiring enough people to do more SP releases for XP would have been trivial.

I suggest to you that no service packs were released during the last 3 years so as to not interfere (i.e. make XP more desirable and easy to use) with the release of Vista. Just poor execution that Vista's release was delayed for so long.

I'm not claiming that the specific group of packages, updates, & changes known as SP3 could have been released 3 years ago- I'm claiming that an appropriate group of packages, updates, & changes for the timeframe could have been released 3 years ago, and should have been. MS simply choose not to do so.

Feel free to document (well, to that extent that I've documented) this lack of pain for the users of XP.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Blakey Rat]

If those people really cared, they could quite easily have found computers running Windows XP. If Vista was as terrible as people on this site thinks it was, then vendors who 'hide' their XP options would be losing business because of it.

I think it's much, much more likely that Vista isn't nearly as bad as Slashdotters think.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Blakey Rat]

Read the white paper, look at the load Vista puts on all hardware operations to enforce DRM. Everything you do on Vista is slower so that MS can "protect" DRM files, even when you are using them, or have no intention to do so.

Yada, yada, jibber, jabber. That's not a specific example, and nothing I can reproduce in a casual living room environment, and therefore I don't care. You're trying to convince me, remember? Convince me! Show me! Hell, I want to be shown! And yet nobody on Slashdot can provide a single concrete example of it.

Sure, the DRM infestation on Vista doesn't break things if you personally have no DRM "equipped" media- no itunes, no netflicks, etc. But you still get the overhead and consequent slowdown.

I have iTunes with DRMed tracks in it, and Vista hasn't prevented me from doing anything with them. Including burning them to CD and re-ripping them to remove the DRM.

I'm not going to respond to "overhead", because it's a non-argument. And I don't have the equipment or lab to test a "slowdown" because of that, although maybe if you provided a single example that makes the slowdown blatantly obvious I could. Just a Slashdot urban legend.

The change in sound API (Application Programming Interface) and the underlying sound models means that the older sound cards won't work without updated drivers. Creative sound card owners get screwed as the sound hardware (DSP) on the card that they already paid for isn't utilized, because the DRM on Vista can't trust it.

Yes, we already discussed the driver problem.

But you used the word "broken." It's not broken. It works fine. It works better than the sound in XP did, by having more features. Face it, you blatantly lied to me, and everybody on this site, when even the dimmest bulb can witness sound coming from Vista computers.

Sorry, I should have been more clear- Vista is useless on older hardware that only supports 512 MB of ram. You know, those 3 & 4 year old systems most people are using. Yes, I've used vista on low end Dell with just 512 of ram, and it took minutes just to open menus. Completely unuseable.

I didn't have that experience on a 3-year-old computer. It strikes me that it's probably more due to Vista's somewhat sketchy driver support than anything fundamentally wrong with Vista's design... my guess would be your older computer had some piece of hardware with an extremely flakey driver, a piece of hardware that my otherwise-similar computer didn't have.

In any case, "unusable on one specific low-end Dell" is a far, far cry from "unusable on all computers with 512 MB of RAM" which is what you were quite clearly asserting. Another blatant lie, BTW.

You're joking right? Microsoft has cash reserves of over $40 billion, and in today's IT world, that's as close to infinite as it gets. If MS felt the need to so, hiring enough people to do more SP releases for XP would have been trivial.

You can't hire good people by waving cash at them. And, frankly, Microsoft's all hired-out here in the Seattle area... I work at a tech company here that's been trying to recruit for ages, and we can't get any decent candidates, I presume Microsoft's suffering from the exact same problem. You're talking about three months at the very minimum from a new hire to putting them on your flagship OS product.

You're also talking about multiplying the massive amount of hardware required for OS QA by two, including more hiring for all the IT staff required to install and maintain that hardware. (I'd imagine it takes a full year just to get a decent hardware lab up and running, but I could be way off there.)

Trivial? Seriously? Are you even in this industry? (God, I hope not, if you consider tasks like that 'trivial'.)

To paraphrase the old saying, you can't pay a pregnant woman $40 billion and expect her to produce the baby in three months.

I'm not claiming that the specific group of packages, updates, & changes k

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Cairnarvon]

"Most people don't care enough to go out of their way to find a vendor who will still sell them an XP machine" is hardly the same thing as "Vista is popular". Fact remains that a significant number of vendors only carry Vista anymore and won't install XP on customers' machines even if they buy it separately (this is true for all stores in my city, at least), and that's pretty much the only reason Vista is seeing these adoption rates.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[edxwelch]

You scored +5 funny. I hope you intended your question to be a joke ;)

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[slimjim8094]

Only on Slashdot. If you look at adoption rates, you'll see Vista is doing just fine. It's already 10% of the market (as told by website logs), and growing. Let's assume those numbers are accurate and not biased. It's likely less - developers using Vista on a VM or something.

Anyways, it's been a fucking year and a half. If we assume every new (wintel) computer purchase has Vista on it... that's only 10% of the population buying a new computer in a year and a half.

That averages out to a 15 year lifespan...

You'd think it should be much, much, much, much higher. I know a lot of people (majority) that replace their computer every 5 years, and I imagine that's pretty common. So that should be something like 1.5/5, or 30% of the population is replacing their computers. If they were getting Vista, wouldn't that be a 30% and over?

Those results don't include upgrades, only 'natural growth'. That suggests that:
1) People aren't upgrading their computers (they don't need to?)
2) Vista sucks, and a lot of people are getting XP instead of Vista on their new computer.

I think it's a mix of both. Keep in mind that 5 years ago was 2003, and really is approaching the lifetime of a PC.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Vectronic]

We all hate DRM, or at least we should if we don't...

Broken Audio API/etc ... agreed, thats my ONLY problem with Vista (as far as general "does it work?" goes) thats just flatout retardation on Microsofts part in the age of MP3 Players, YouTube, MediaCenter, etc.

Too many versions? ... completely agree, infact even XP with its 2 versions (Home/Pro) I find redundant, the OS shouldnt have versions, it should have options, Disable This, Don't Install That, Enable This, especially since they all (XP and Vista) asks you "What/Where Will You Be Using This Computer For?" during the setup process, just have that answer do an auto-configure...

Those points I agree with.

Old Computers (Drivers/RAM) ... when XP first came out, did you really expect it to run on a machine that was designed for Win95?.. it's been roughly the same amount of years between XP and Win95, as Vista and XP... huge advancements, and expectations have come in the meantime, if you have old equipement, then run an older OS... "the thing I hate about gasoline automobiles, is, where do I put the water and coal?"...

512MB was pretty much the "Standard" amount of RAM that came with new PC's when XP was released (as far as consumer/home PC's go)... thats now generally at least 1536, and usually 2048 now with new computers, XP or otherwise...

And what the hell does SP1 being released just recently have to do with it? I suppose you meant that it was "slow" in coming... which, I for the most part agree with, but considering they have XP/Server 2003/Vista/Server 2008/Win7/Office 2003/2007/OOXML/Lawsuits/whatever else that are all in pretty high demand for support/interest/attention... their workload is pretty high, 50,0000 or whatever employees or not...

And the last points, SP3 could have been released anytime in the last 2 (maybe 3 years) considering not all that much has been done in that time to/for it... but did they have to? there really isnt any major changes in SP3, its just a plain old SP, not some grand "wow this comes in an SP?" that was SP2... most of its major changes are compatability with Vista/Server2008/IIS and new networking related stuff, anyone with an internet connection could have gotten all the minor updates at any point through MSUpdate/MSDN/KnowledgeBase for free...

Personally, I almost wish they had procrastinated a bit longer, because the longer they did so, the longer XP will be maintained and the more is in the SP...

Final point... Microsoft has always been bad for Beta Testing, mainly because they basically dont... its more of a "selected" beta test... fairly useless, they generally just release it, hope for the best, and rely on the feedback from "Send This Error Report" and forums/KB/etc...

Which, isnt any different from most other "user friendly" OSs, they are all adopting the "Send Report" method, which means they are getting lazy...

But, i'll shut up now...

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[DAldredge]

What city is this?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[DAldredge]

I use Vista on a daily basis. I would love to be able to replicate all these issues people claim to be having but most refuse to give out enough information so that the issue can be reproduced.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[DAldredge]

Then why can I copy video files at wire speed across my internal network?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[DAldredge]

And those technical reasons are?

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[SenorCitizen]

Did I mention the DRM? http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/vistas-multimedia-mess/

I'm curious. The blog you linked says that Vista would decline to play a DRM-protected audio CD over SPDIF outputs. How would it know that an audio CD has DRM, does Vista's Windows Media Player have an ID list of every possible DRM scheme used on audio CDs?

I think not. What's probably going on here is that the author tried to play one of those trick CDs that have several sessions, and when used with a computer the session that's visible is the data CD session that holds DRM'd WMA versions of the songs.

You have NEVER been able to play DRM-crippled WMA files over SPDIF. This is NOT a Vista thing, it's an inherent idiocy in Windows Media DRM.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Ressurrector]

So far this man has the BEST reply in this thread and one yall had BETTER heed well.. People NOW admit VISTA is garbage just like EVEN Republicans NOW admit the Bush administration is garbage. I have been building pc's since 95. I go back to win 3.1 and I DARE say Vista is AS slow as pc's were back in 95 and THAT is unacceptable in 2008 by ANY OS IMHO............ Now do you REALLY think M$ is ABOVE sabotage??? guess again .I can't prove it BUT I believe SOMEHOW windows sabotaged Netscape on machines..5 minutes on navigator and you see it was clearly the superior browser YET it had an AWFULL lot of Blue screens to be a product that ran SO FAST AND SMOOTH!! This is all obvious to me and like dude said this was done because XP is a HELL of alot better then Vista!!! Everyone has been bitchin bout Vista HARD the past 6 months even them gay ass mac commercials outlining vista's slaw performance YET its on every new machine AND they announced XP's execution/decommision date.........SO how do you make the public more interestered in the slaw OS that is Vista????????? you do things to F@#K Up XP OF COURSE!!!!!!! XP HAS the BEST WINDOWS OS I have seen out the M$ camp and I been pcing since 95.........Its got half a decade of distuingished service and field testing PLUS before XP it was pretty commen to have to format AT LEAST once or twice a year ( because viruses,registry errors,other problems etc)NOW you can go indefinately as XP is self repairing and features USEFULL additions such as restore points....... As in the old saying " If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it"

Time to upgrade

[Midnight Thunder]

Maybe this was just a sneaky way of trying to get people to 'upgrade' to Vista. Then again this is probably more evidence of a broken process at Microsoft.

Re:Time to upgrade

[idiotnot]

That was exactly my thought. Then again, my Vista SP1 patch was completely uneventful the other night, too. I think there may be a connection here somewhere.....

Re:Time to upgrade

[WiglyWorm]

Please. Not to rush to Microsoft's defence and appear a fanboy (as I'm sure people will think anyway), but the shear ammount of variance in hardware that Microsoft has to code for means there are going to be bugs. No matter how tight their QA is, they cannot possibly test on every hardware variant.

Now, they could do what linux does, and just pick and choose what hardware they support, but with their dominant market position, that would probably look bad. Plus, since you have to be a lot less tech savy to run windows than to run linux, linux users are much more likely to know what's in their computer than a windows user.

So, while it's very likely that there are a lot of broken processes at Microsoft (of which Vista is a shining example), I wouldn't say that a buggy patch is indicitive of such. )

Re:Time to upgrade

[cyborch]

[...] the shear ammount of variance in hardware that Microsoft has to code for means there are going to be bugs. No matter how tight their QA is, they cannot possibly test on every hardware variant. Of course, it's not Microsofts fault :)

Re:Time to upgrade

[Undead NDR]

Now, they could do what linux does, and just pick and choose what hardware they support, but with their dominant market position, that would probably look bad.

That's exactly what they did since day 1. They chose to support IBM's PC architecture.

Re:Time to upgrade

[Foofoobar]

Maybe this was a stupid way of getting people to buy a Mac.

Re:Time to upgrade

[HeronBlademaster]

I don't like that commercial because it claims that Apple makes all their hardware themselves.

(That is obviously not the case; they simply pick out which hardware to sell, which is a far cry from making it themselves.)

I know what they meant to say - that they control the hardware and the software, so their OS is more stable - but what they say and what they mean are not the same.

Access Denied!!!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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), I installed SP3 while AVG was running and it worked just fine.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

They suggest closing antivirus if you get "Access is Denied". The problem is that once you get the "Access Denied" error, you have to wait a half hour for it to uninstall SP3, and then it leaves you with a comforting final message "Windows may no longer work properly"... I doubt closing antivirus would help unless it's really restrictive.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[Taliesin]

I just installed SP3 on my mother-in-law's new Dell laptop running Norton Internet Security (which included anti-virus functionality) and didn't encounter any problems.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Again, antivirus was probably never going to be a problem. I got it working by running Microsoft's utility that changes permissions on all entries in the registry and all files in the Windows directory, as Microsoft suggested.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[kylehase]

Installed on three machines with Nod32, Avira and AVG and none of them required stopping the AV. You sure you didn't download a fake WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe?

Re:Access Denied!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

And there is an Run As... Administrator option in XP

Re:Access Denied!!!

[pete_norm]

I find it strange that someone that doesn't have the admin rights necessary to turn the anti-virus off would be allowed to install a service pack update on his computer. I guess security policy vary wildly from one company to another...

Re:Access Denied!!!

[Monsieur Canard]

I had that too, and oddly enough it was the same thing that was preventing me from upgrading AVG 7.5 to 8.0. I did the reset permissions thing and then both installs went fine.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

The access denied is not due to user login security level. I was logged in as an Admin. Our AV is networked and can only be unloaded from the workstation, not temporarily closed or disabled. The problem was that certain registry entries or Windows system files had very specifiy security settings that did not allow even administrators to modify them.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[xmas2003]

I got the "Access Denied" problem on two machines ... in both cases, there was a Registry permission issue. I was able to fix on one ... but for the other, I did a clean install - just as well, since some of the registry entries were kinda fishy looking. It is a bit scary to have it all run for a long time, get the "Access Denied" issue, have it say it is rolling back, but Windows XP may not be stable - D'OH! ;-)

Re:Access Denied!!!

[thebonafortuna]

I installed it with McAfee running and it worked just fine.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[toddestan]

I have full administrator rights to my PC at work, and could install SP3 if I wanted to (I'll let those that are too foolish to disable the fully automatic Windows Updates take the hit first, then see) but the AV (Symantec, really horrible) is password protected and I can't do much of anything with it except to manually initiate a scan.

Re:Access Denied!!!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Ha! You call me the ignorant one. First, it was an automatic update, unless you call that notice saying "Updates are ready for your computer" something besides "automatic update"... Second, what I said came directly from Microsoft's suggestions for resolving the "Access Denied" error in a knowledgebase article they wrote specifically for Service Pack 3. Just because you assumed that I was talking about a problem that everyone would encounter, not simply those who got the Access Denied error, don't call me the ignorant one.

Easier to read version.

[AltGrendel]

Here.

It has a banner add at the top, but at least it doesn't have the rest of the cruft on the page.

Re:Easier to read version.

[street struttin']

It has a banner add at the top This is like the third time this week I've seen this, and I'm not really looking, but dammit, this is retarded. It's an "ad" not an "add". "ad" is short for "advertisement". Just because firefox's spellcheck doesn't catch it, doesn't mean it's correct.

People mess with thier own machines..

[Tominva1045]

FTA: Typically, the glitches are due to conflicts with software, such as drivers, system files, or applications already resident on the user's PC. The machines arrive in a pristine state. Users then add, sometimes compliant sometimes non-compliant software, hardware, and modify the registry. There should be no surprise that issues will arise. There are less-popular operating systems with upgrade / driver issues way worse than this.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[Dancindan84]

Yes, but the updates in those cases probably aren't done as a critical update that basically gets shoved down the users' throats. There's likely a lot of people blindly installing SP3 when they get the pop up that could be in jeopardy of having their computer locked up on them. Those type of people also likely don't know how to fix something like that on their own, so they're going to have to fork over $80/hour for some teenager at Best Buy to tell them it can't be fixed and blow away their install.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[heritage727]

So as long as I don't install any software on my machine or do anything that changes the registry I'll be OK? I think the next computer I buy I'll just leave in the box. That way I'm sure not to have problems like this.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[JeremyGNJ]

I disagree that computers arrive in a "pristine state".

All too often machines arrive with a whole slew of crap-ware pre-installed. These programs are generally either outdated by the time the user gets the PC (ie Real-Player et al), or just half-assed software written by a 2-bit audio-chipset-maker. These programs are rarely tested properly or in a timely manner when it comes to Service Packs, and there's no way MS could ever account for them.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[UnknowingFool]

Looks like someone had a real breakthrough. Unlike this guy.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[bellers]

>>There are less-popular operating systems with upgrade / driver issues way worse than this.

Slackware, I'm looking at you.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[Tominva1045]

That slew of crap IS the pristine state that the manufacturer tested. Then the user gets a hold of it and messes things up. Then all bets are off.

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[Sun.Jedi]

I find my servers work far better before users actually try to use them, or after I've kicked them off. /intended sarcasm

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[jalet]

You seem to be suggesting that end users could be safe of such problems if they didn't install any software in addition to windows, these idiots !

I'm not sure their computer would be very useful then, especially with the crap "applications" coming with windows...

Re:People mess with thier own machines..

[MikeFM]

Which less popular operating systems? I use Mac OS and Linux and don't have anything like the problems I have with Windows (although SP3 caused me no problems).

I have an AIX server too but upgrades are handled by IBM so I can't fairly say it goes smoothly or not. ;)

Just a quick thank-you

[LearnToSpell]

to all the beta testers out there. You know who you are! We appreciate all your hard work, and when we install SP3 several months from now, when it's ready for release, we'll be sure to think of you sucke^Wkind folks.

Re:Just a quick thank-you

[zzottt]

Thanks man! I needed a good laugh

Huh

[His Shadow]

Four systems and counting , including my own laptop, i have upgraded to SP3 and not any problems of any kind. Systems even seem snappier. I did have to replace the standard Windows boot screen on my lappy. SP3 would not install with a custom boot up screen. For all my bile directed at Microsoft, XP is the most stable and versatile Windows I've ever used. People don't want to switch because of that, and Vista offers nothing at all compelling. Especially since it expects you to abandon all your current hardware and peripherals.

Re:Huh

[InsaneMosquito]

SP2 wouldn't install with a custom boot screen either.

Re:Huh

[Corporate Troll]

What I think is that many of the people who have problems, already had some malware running on their system and they didn't notice... SP3 just "highlighted" the fact that there was something fishy going on under the hood.

Re:Huh

[petermgreen]

IIRC there were similar issues with SP2, on clean systems it generally installed fine but if there were any issues with the system installing it was basically suicide.

In general I would not advise installing a windows service pack on a machine that you can't afford to reinstall/reimage if the install of the service pack goes wrong.

Re:Huh

[street struttin']

Systems even seem snappier. Lol! "Snappier". The ultimate metric for measuring system performance. I'll DEFINITELY be downloading SP3 now, this statement has totally convinced me.

Re:Huh

[His Shadow]

It's entirely subjective, I know. Maybe because said systems didn't crash and burn, everything is hugs and puppies after the install.

Finally

[craagz]

1. Microsoft will now claim windows XP to be defunct and call off all further development on fixes.
2. Sell more Vista
3. Profit
4. World adopts Linux/Mac/Watever

Re:Finally

[esocid]

beat me to it. this is their ulterior motive for sp3, break xp and force people over to vista. damn you ms, you can have my xp when you pry it from my cold dead hands!

Or I'll just stop dual booting and use only fedora. Whatever's easier.

Re:Finally

[Bert64]

That's also exactly why ME was such garbage...
They wanted the world to migrate from 98se to 2000, when that didn't happen they brought out ME and then XP.. ME to convince them what a steaming pile of crap the 9x series was, and XP as a slightly improved 2000.

Re:Finally

[geekoid]

I hope your not serious, this seem to be caused by HP.

Re:installing SP3

[JeremyGNJ]

You are an idiot for not installing SP2 as soon as it was available.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it" does not apply to computers unless you're an end user who doesnt understand how to read the technical benefits you get from a given upgrade/patch/service pack.

Re:installing SP3

[plague3106]

Well, do you consider an OS with security holes broken or not? Personally I do; I'd rather deal with MS trying to fix my computer after an SP messes something up than with a virus trojan that I may not even notice at first.

No Problems

[PeterFnet]

Yeah, I've had ZERO problems with XP SP3. Write an article about that.

Re:No Problems

[peragrin]

you just did.

besides that is like saying I have had zero complaints with SP3. of course I don't own any windows machines to install it onto so i have no idea just what is going on.

Don't mind paying for software. I just expect that software to work.

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[garett_spencley]

"Not that I'm a MS fan-boy, far from it."

Don't worry. I did not feel that was the message you were trying to put across at all.

Your message was clear and unambiguous. You're a fan-boy of murder for hire.

The Microsoft Patch Cycle

[L4t3r4lu5]

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.

Re:The Microsoft Patch Cycle

[darthservo]

Actually, the 300+MB file is the redistributable package. If you get SP3 through Microsoft or Windows Update, the download is only 67MB. Using your formula, that would place the general release for July of this year.

I love the /. bias

[Anonymous Coward]

News about XP SP3 when it's delayed, when it doesn't work with some server...

No news when it's released.

News again when some minority of systems fail the SP3 installation.

I love that Microsoft is held to 100% success rates, too. 100%. Even though there are millions of systems with trillions of potentially screwed up configurations to miss in testing, 100%.

Unless testing for SP3 was going to take hundreds of years, stuff was going to slip through.

Re:I love the /. bias

[cyborch]

With risc of being modded redundant, I have to say of course it's not Microsofts fault ;)

Re:I love the /. bias

[manifoldronin]

I'm not going to defend the /. bias, because it's there big time, and we know it.
But I'm sorry, I am just not buying this "there are too many configuration combinations to test" argument either. Not when we are talking about the third service pack of an operating system that has been running mainstream for 6 years. Not when it would prevent a computer from booting at all.
Hell, at this point in XP's life cycle, there should not have been any service pack at all. All Microsoft should be doing for XP is pushing out real critical security patches, which should address only individual paths.
And as to the success rate Microsoft should be held to, I don't know if it has to be 100% across the board, but I do know that when I've paid for a piece of software, when the vendor of the software has an automatic upgrading mechanism in place that would do even the most radical upgrades behind my back, and when those upgrades could completely shut me off from accessing my computer, yeah, I would think I have every right to demand a 100% success rate on my computer.

Re:I love the /. bias

[GanjaManja]

it's actually a pretty useful article. I'm gonna make sure my work computer doesn't auto-install SP3, 'cuz I know it's kinda buggy and not acting perfectly correctly, which would likey lead to these BSoD/non-booting systems people are experiencing.

however i do agree that I had no idea there was a new SP until I read the article about some people's updates breaking...

Re:I love the /. bias

[Seven001]

You must be new here.

Issue Specifics

[sean_nestor]

From this article on ComputerWorld:

According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality."

Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn't normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes "a big problem," Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.

The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is "most likely not your problem," but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. "Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them," he said.

Re:Issue Specifics

[geekoid]

While it isn't MS's fault, I would suggest that MS should have been testing on some of all the major PC manufactures default configurations.

Yes, I would say that regardless of the OS, it's just good practice.

Re:Issue Specifics

[synthparadox]

Hrm. Thats interesting because my main box runs on an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe with an AMD64 X2 5600+ in it and my Dell Latitude D630 laptop runs a Core 2 Duo and I updated both without problems yesterday. In fact the install yesterday was the most flawless install of anything I've seen in a while.

Whenever a SP/major update is released ...

[jsnipy]

Whenever a SP/major update is released, can't you always find people who are complaining and having trouble?

what?!?!?

[Gewalt]

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.

Re:what?!?!?

[wITTus]

Ever tried to go online directly (without firewall/router) with a fresh installed Windows XP? It will be infected with trojans/virii within a few seconds.

Re:what?!?!?

[Gewalt]

No. Did you have a point?

Re:what?!?!?

[GaryOlson]

Do you also leave all the windows and doors on your personal residence open and unlocked at all times?

Re:what?!?!?

[wITTus]

Imagine a company network: You cannot even close your "windows and doors" because your Windows machine needs to be connected to other Windows PCs. Do you want to install a linux machine or a router in front of each windows machine, just to be sure it won't be infected with trojans via RPC or other services? No. So you don't have no other choice than to install the SPs. One single trojan inside of your network and all machines would be infected.

Re:what?!?!?

[petermgreen]

XP without service packs does have a built in firewall that is adequate for the purpose of protecting a box while installing updates. You just have to remember to turn it on.

Re:what?!?!?

[Phroggy]

Ever tried to go online directly (without firewall/router) with a fresh installed Windows XP? It will be infected with trojans/virii within a few seconds. Uh, sure, but nobody actually does that anymore. Just about the only end users going online without NAT are people on dialup, and they can turn the software firewall on before they connect.

Re:what?!?!?

[Real1tyCzech]

Ever read a comment and completely missed a key point (such as the line where he said he installed using slipstreamed XP discs?)

Re:what?!?!?

[Nicolay77]

I can't even if I want.

All ADSL modems sold (leased) here act as a NAT router and firewall.

If I type ipconfig in the console I will never get a valid public IP address, I will get one like 192.168.0.x.

One of the finest pieces of software ever made

[WiglyWorm]

If the blurb is to believed, and there are only "hundreds" of complaints about SP3, then this truely is one of the most well written updates any one from any company has ever made.

Re:One of the finest pieces of software ever made

[kalirion]

The rest of the people can't send in a complaint because their only computer won't boot.

Mod this one informative

[Lonewolf666]

Looks like a screwup by OEMs that was exposed by the service pack.

Re:Mod this one informative

[petermgreen]

well more generally it seems like the real issue is that an OS can end up in loads of different configurations even on the same hardware depending on how it was deployed. This makes the pool of possible configurations (which even counting just hardware configurations is already far too big to thouroughly test) even bigger.

I would certainly consider a crash caused by loading an unnessacery driver to be a bug. Particularlly when having a previous version of that driver loaded was harmless.

Re:Mod this one informative

[Lonewolf666]

Usually, you know what hardware you have and you apply the correct drivers. Also, many setup programs have safety checks built in, as in "stop installation when correct chipset is not detected".

In this case it seems that HP and others took disk images from Intel machines and copied them onto AMD machines. That circumvents any test the driver developer might have implemented in the setup program. At best, the driver will re-check for the correct chipset at startup (and what then? Refuse to run and leave the OS minus an important driver? Almost as bad).

In short, the really surprising thing is that the computers did NOT fail under SP2. The OEMs made a pretty stupid mistake here and deserve to be bashed.

Re:To disable AV

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Err... our AV is run over the network. Besides, I think the suggestion to close AV is only true for AV software that is highly restrictive.

Lost TCP/IP on my install yesterday

[RPGonAS400]

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.

Re:Lost TCP/IP on my install yesterday

[the_wesman]

I just bought a Lenovo laptop with XP Pro for my wife that came yesterday

... your other wives, that didn't come, get nothing.

-w

Re:Lost TCP/IP on my install yesterday

[Frequency Domain]

SP3 is being billed as a security update. By removing TCP/IP you're now inoculated against that interweb thing. It's a feature, not a bug!

Re:Lost TCP/IP on my install yesterday

[tokul]

SP3 wipes out TCP/IP for that laptop

Or Lenovo sold you laptop with non-standard Windows XP TCP/IP stack.

Re:Lost TCP/IP on my install yesterday

[steelfood]

That's fair, considering that she actually came for him, assuming it actually was for him and not for the life-sized poster of Brad Pitt on the ceiling.

Microsoft - you never fail to amaze

[unity100]

here, those ms fanbois with mod points among us. now you can waste your mod points on this post so that you wont be able to use it to downmod any valid comment from anyone else. thank you.

Re:Microsoft - you never fail to amaze

[Kalriath]

No problem there, from what I see there are no valid comments to avoid. They're all "Windows sucks" (redundant, we know that already), "Class action lawsuit?" (it'd have to be intentional for that, and companies don't break service packs intentionally), "This is obviously to sell Vista" (regardless of what you'd like to believe, Vista is actually selling quite well, and doesn't have the miserable uptake you think) and "Just use Linux" (if we wanted to use Linux, we would be. Let me know when it supports every software package I want to use, mmkay? And no, I'm not switching packages)

Re:installing SP3

[kalirion]

If they released this as a critical update, wouldn't it be picked up by auto-update if you have that turned on?

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[brigc]

FWIW, she was playing a private detective... great series of mystery novels, crappy movie. :(

Re:Wow

[CmdrGravy]

To be fair the grandparent poster is right, a dozen or so failures out of tens of thousands is not too bad going and I have to say yum is right now failing to update things properly on my machine. It seems to have got confused as to which nvidia module to use with the kernel with the result that you need to set up the screen resolution etc everytime it boots.

Re:installing SP3

[Bert64]

Which is exactly the problem...
You should be able to get security patches WITHOUT having to install lots of other unrelated cruft alongside it, and that includes things like stability related patches where the issue they address wasn't affecting you in the first place.

The addition of new features could potentially bring new security holes (more code to exploit), as well as harming performance and wasting space... Try comparing the speed of XP with and without SP2 side by side on the same hardware.

XP SP3 & HP/AMD

[another joe]

This link may be helpful http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2008/05/08/does-your-amd-based-computer-boot-after-installing-xp-sp3.aspx

They should put this in the readme.txt

[argStyopa]

So the point is, make sure you have your linux bootable cd available when you install the XP3 patch, so that if this is the issue you can successfully boot up, go in, delete that offending file, and you'll be good to go!

Re:They should put this in the readme.txt

[Nicolay77]

Actually, I would use UBCD4Win.

Worked well for me

[EasyTarget]

At the risk of getting flamed to hell (this is /.)

SP3 actually improved my old thinkpad. The XP copy on it was really struggling after years of being used as the 'windows toy'. No media (my bad) so I've never reinstalled it. I allowed SP3 on with some trepidation, but the end result is that the machine is a darned sight more spry (fast and responsive) than it was before. I think the installer basically did a good job of repairing the OS while patching it.

I was pretty surprised.. it's pretty rare that anything from Redmond makes me feel that it's an improvement..

Re:Worked well for me

[Toasty16]

Just seconding your comment, SP3 made a big positive difference on my HP 6715b (AMD chipset), one really noticeable thing is that the Add/Remove software window loads super fast compared to how long it used to take. Overall its a very good update.

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[R2.0]

Wife was a big fan of the books, so we saw the movie. Bleh. Best line: "Do yuou know how hard it is to get blood out of cashmere!"

I just closed my eyes and though about "Body Heat".

no IE6?

[werdnapk]

Not being able to downgrade to IE6 is a bad thing?

Re:no IE6?

[GaryOlson]

Unfortunately, yes. I have some old HP JetDirect cards which only work with IE5. I keep a (unpatched, not updated, SP0) Windows XP VM around just to connect to those printers.

Re:no IE6?

[Penguin Follower]

Not being able to downgrade to IE6 is a bad thing?

Believe it or not, there are still some very proprietary business oriented websites out there that still don't support IE7 officially. If you worked in the automotive industry you'd be familiar with that of which I speak. One website I am thinking of in particular, is so heavily MS-extended javascript that you can't even log in using Firefox. You absolutely have to use IE on that site. AND they don't officially support the use of IE7 with it. :(

Re:no IE6?

[petermgreen]

It isn't as bad as some people are making out. If you have IE7 installed when you install SP3 you can't go back to IE6 afterwards but SP3 does not force you to upgrade to IE7.

And as you imply if you have to run an old insecure browser for some specific task using a VM is probablly a good idea.

Re:no IE6?

[Darth_brooks]

Have you flashed the firmware on those Jetdirects? Usually that will get you working on a semi-recent version of IE.

I've had the same issue with older Compaq and HP iLo ports. The last firware releases for the product will at least let it work with IE 6. In particular, I had an iLo port that firefox wouldn't go near, but after a firmware flash, IE6 gave me a quick nag screen about an expired cert, then connected like the insecure little whore that it is.

Re:no IE6?

[NVP_Radical_Dreamer]

Not being able to downgrade to IE6 is a bad thing? Yes, its a huge thing. In the medical industry where I work, things sometimes move at a snails pace. So this means for instance our web browser based PACS imaging software doesnt work because it uses and ActiveX control that doesnt work on IE7. The vendor has been slow to provide an update to allow it to work with IE7 so until then we are stuck.

Re:no IE6?

[the_bahua]

The company where I work has countless internal and external web applications that were written specifically for IE5/6, and when accessed with IE7 cease to function properly, if at all. Developing for a specific http client, especially IE, is a very careless and foolish thing, but it's unfortunately been the way of the world until relatively recently.

Re:installing SP3

[HandsOnFire]

I haven't had a virus or Trojan or anything like that in over 5 years. Just stay behind a firewall and tweak a few things (disable a few services, turn off activeX, put an admin password) and everything works dandy. If you actually look at where security breaches happen for XP, just about all of them happen in those 3 things I mentioned. It's not that had to keep the machine safe if you know how to operate it.

Re:installing SP3

[MightyYar]

Aren't you being a bit... harsh? Even Windows 98 is perfectly safe if you run antivirus, stay behind a hardware firewall, and use Firefox with some modest precautions (noscript for starters).

My company put off SP2 for a very long time because a piece of enterprise software wouldn't run on it. While my company may be full of idiots, their decision not to load SP2 was sound at the time.

Finally they made XP secure

[g0bshiTe]

FTFA

The service pack should offer a number of enhancements over the current version of the OS, which Microsoft is phasing out after June 30th. It includes all updates issued since Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released in 2004, and some new elements.

I'm glad MS figured out how to secure Windows totally.

No IE8 problems here

[The MAZZTer]

I installed SP3 on an SP2 computer running IE8 beta (didn't realize I should've uninstalled it first) and had no problems. IE8 still works AFAI can tell. I don't use it for much other than Microsoft Update, though the Developer Tools are welcome for when I have to make a website IE-compatible (I know the Developer Toolbar was a separate add-on for IE6/7 but it broke for me recently and I couldn't get it to work again).

Re:No IE8 problems here

[denis-The-menace]

note: You might not be able to remove it when another version of IE8 comes out.

Wreaking Havoc

[gregarican]

Not sensationalizing are we? I would call wreaking havoc something like when Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6 was released. Back in the day our corporate IT didn't deploy service packs in a testbed to ensure things were copacetic. Instead they remotely deployed them to all branch sites. Coming into work the next day and see most servers' TCP/IP stacks were broken as a result made for a busy day managing our site's help desk. Thank God for Service Pack 6a! I must say that over the years their service pack releases have been much more stable and reliable. And it's like that Mac/PC ad Apple has out. With all of the different hardware and software combinations out there how can any service pack expect to be 100% spot on? Of course it's not Mac's fault...

Re:installing SP3

[plague3106]

You should be able to get security patches WITHOUT having to install lots of other unrelated cruft alongside it, and that includes things like stability related patches where the issue they address wasn't affecting you in the first place.

You can. Very few security patches aren't available stand alone. For those that aren't, it's probably because the fix really requires multiple patches to be effective. Hence the SP.

The addition of new features could potentially bring new security holes (more code to exploit)

Which is why MS has stopped providing new features in service packs. When SP2 for XP was released, they caught A LOT of flak for that.. so much that they changed their policies on new features in service packs.

as well as harming performance and wasting space... Try comparing the speed of XP with and without SP2 side by side on the same hardware.

Wasting space? If a security patch makes a file larger, I consider that a small price to pay. That's just a silly argument. The space the OS takes is always less than the space of the applications I install.

As for performance, again, I'd rather something run slower and be secure than run fast and be insecure. Secure code has a cost, usually performance. You may as well say you'd rather Win98; no security there, and it runs faster than XP on the same hardware. I find this to be a rather weak argument. I never noticed any peformance loss in any of the computers on which I've installed SP2.

And last time I checked...

[tpz]

And last time I checked, my SP2 installation already had all available security fixes, making SP3 a feature-only upgrade for me. The classic "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"-doesn't-apply-to-computers line from several parents back is bullshit, or at the very least it is bullshit if you like to place any reliance on your machine. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" most definitely does apply to computers.

I have a mission-critical Windows machine, for example, that I NEVER blindly patch. NEVER EVER. That this machine rarely goes on the internet (and even then is well protected) is obviously a very nice bonus, but still, it doesn't get patched unless there is an exact patch to fix an exact problem that has been identified on the machine, and even then it isn't done without first imaging the system and then doing significant testing during available downtime. To do otherwise is simple irresponsibility, to myself and the value of my own time at the very least. I can only imagine how such idiocy doesn't result in (more) firings when people dare skip these steps at their place of employment.

Works fine here

[Spad]

I've installed SP3 on about 15 desktop machines that needed RDP 6.1 (Long story) and not only are they running without any issues, but they were upgraded from SP2 to SP3 RC2 and then to SP3 without any issues.

Urk

[Detritus]

It killed my system (hangs during loading screen), and it doesn't appear to be due to any of the bugs that have been discussed on the net. It is an AMD CPU based system. I can dual boot into Vista and it still works. This is the first time that an XP service pack has borked my system.

Re:Urk

[hyades1]

It's the first Service Pack since Vista was released, isn't it?

Wow....

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

It was through automatic update... and this same error is happening to a ton of people online; google for: xp "service pack 3" access denied. Microsoft already has a few knowledgebase entries about it. That was what I was talking about in my original post....... yeeeeesh....

Re:installing SP3

[KillerBob]

I haven't had a virus or Trojan or anything like that that I know of in over 5 years.

There. Fixed that for you.

Service Packs are more than functionality upgrades. They also include fixes for security issues. You'd do well to keep your computer up to date... leaving security holes unpatched is just asking for trouble.

SP 3 Corrupted GRUB

[ahabswhale]

I have a dual boot machine with XP on one partition, and Ubuntu 7.10 on another. After installing SP 3, grub failed to function so my computer would not boot to either operating system.

As it turned out the fix was simple: I happened to have a Hardy Heron disk lying around, so I put that in (thinking I might just install that over Gutsy and then it would restore grub) and selected the "Boot from first hard drive" option and voila! Windows started. After rebooting, the grub boot menu was working normally again.

Re:SP 3 Corrupted GRUB

[smittyoneeach]

Yeah. I just rebuilt my machine from scratch, (using licensed stuff).
Windows won't install if it sees any unknown partition types (at least Linux ones).
It will waste your time making it look like it's scanning the disk or something, but an overnight run bought me nothing.
So you dump all of your non-Redmond partitions, and install XP.
Windows finds much joy in rebooting itself during the install. You're not "supposed" to have any foreign partitions anyway (are you?) so they seem comfortable in asserting that your MBR should point to the NTFS partition. Why would it do otherwise?
After the ugliness of getting Windows installed, you can put GRUB on the MBR, go back to restoring whatever other partitions you desire, and using your purchase as you see fit.
Trying to back up the MBR using dd and then restore it via dd, instead of just using the GRUB install method, resulted in much ugliness. Either my command line was false, or there is a checksum in there. In any case letting GRUB install itself proved the only acceptable approach (for me; you might not be the sort of goofball who dropped your NTFS partition in the first place)
Long story short, Windows XP is the [odious presidential candidate] of operating systems.

Re:SP 3 Corrupted GRUB

[Jellybob]

That's always been the case - Windows has a habit of overwriting your MBR, causing Grub to stop loading.

Re:SP 3 Corrupted GRUB

[ahabswhale]

I could understand it for a full install of Windows but there's no reason for them to mess with the MBR for a service pack.

Re:SP 3 Corrupted GRUB

[nawcom]

this shouldn't be much of an issue; if an update reinstalls ntldr and overwrites the mbr, simply boot off of a syslinux flash drive, floppy, or cd (distro installation), mount your linux partition that holds your grub data, and run grub-install. it will overwrite the mbr with grub. problem solved.

Anyone else thinking that MS wants to kill off XP?

[distantbody]

...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...

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[GaryOlson]

...something like "Sure I've killed a few dozen people, but that's insignificant compared to the population".

Your message was clear and unambiguous. You're a fan-boy of murder for hire.

I thought his message showed he is a fan-boy of statistics.

Re:installing SP3

[enHatt]

What exactly was the benefit of installing SP3, besides more security?

It did install Genuine Advantage and checked that my install was legit, but that's doesn't really make for a huzzah moment, and I haven't noticed any change the short time I used it afterwards.

It didn't seem like that big of a deal, but security fixes are always welcome.

Re:installing SP3

[geekoid]

No they are not.
You should wait to see what happens on other computers before doing any OS upgrade.
If you are a single user, wait, if you are a company put it on test machines.

Your an idiot for not understanding the the PC upgrade history is far from stellar. Yes, SP2 was fine, but that's hind sight.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it"
That's exactly how you should deal with computers.

My Experience...

[thebonafortuna]

Downloaded and installed on my six year old ThinkPad A31 last night -- everything works fine. Didn't even take all that long.

Might be redundant, but I think its become important for people not having problems to report on that now too, considering the heat M$ takes on just about everything these days. If my old computer can handle the process of upgrading to SP3, not sure why its "wreaking havoc" with so many others...

Re:installing SP3

[JeremyGNJ]

Which is why MS has stopped providing new features in service packs. When SP2 for XP was released, they caught A LOT of flak for that.. so much that they changed their policies on new features in service packs. This is actually not true. Every service pack ever released before XP-SP2 did not have major new features. It has always been the MS policy to use Service Packs as patches-only.

Microsoft was REALLY not going to release those features as a service pack. There were going to release it as a NEW OS VERSION! (Imgine what people on /. would be saying here if they had done that?)

Jim Allchin insisted that Microsoft needed to improve it's security image and that the features should be released as a free service pack.

You are right though, you will likely never see another service pack like SP2.

More details.. AKA - AMD is screwed.

[geekoid]

"According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality."

That's from an article in computer world.

I would be mildly surprised if only HP does this.

Re:More details.. AKA - AMD is screwed.

[Detritus]

I originally installed XP from the retail package distribution disk, so I doubt that's the problem.

Why isn't the silly thing telling me why it can't boot? Real programmers check for errors, setup timeout timers and retry counters, and display error messages. The loading screen does display a working progress indicator, which makes me wonder who wrote code that indicates progress when the boot process is stalled.

Re:More details.. AKA - AMD is screwed.

[xhrit]

microsoft could never write a real progress meter, so most ov the time they don't even try. think ov it more like the hourglass - it just sits and spins.

March 2009

[Cap'n.Brownbeard]

(343 x 3) / 100 = 10.29

declare
L4t3r4lu5_SP3_Release_date date;
begin
select add_months(to_date('2008/05/06', 'YYYY/MM/DD'), 10.29) into L4t3r4lu5_SP3_Release_date from dual;
end;

Cool a new conspiracy theory

[arrgster]

Here's my theory, they did this on purpose to make everyone hate XP so we will now flock to vista... They can even say.. hey look it's an old OS it's going to have problems like this, that's why you need to buy Vista.. Then you'll have the same problems because you moved to a new OS, which is better because it's new...

Re:Slashdot rule #2

[Beefslaya]

Slashdot rule #1

There will always be a MCSE with Bill and Steve's penis' in his mouth, defending Microsoft after a posting about a critical update that breaks lots of stuff.

Break free from your chains. Try something new for a change.

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[up2ng]

Now Kathleen Turner is as bloated as XP is, good comparison

uh?

[nozzo]

'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....' Well I crashed my car and it ended up on it's roof, then I couldn't get it to drive. Is it the car vendors fault? When you read the SP3 readme there isn't any seachanges going on there, just a raft of hotfixes that were available from Windows Update and some Svr2008 compat stuff. If the system BSOD's then maybe it's a driver issue, a quick going over the dmp with windbg should reveal the root cause. If you can't do windbg stuff then learn about it as it's a great skill to add to your cv + you'll be able to find out what's up with your system.

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[Jaysyn]

Which is even funnier because she was a private detective in that flick.

/integrate

[unrealmp3]

I wouldn't really apply a Service Pack on a live system. Integrate the Service Pack 3 to your installation CD, and install a clean OS. There are so much different configurations that a Service Pack, which deeply modify the operating system, it's almost impossible it might not cause issues on a running operating system. I've installed a slipstreamed Windows XP Service Pack 3 without any problems.

Re:installing SP3

[geekoid]

I've had a hmoe computers as long as there has been a home computer market, and the only virus I have ever had was on an Apple IIc. Some clown created a virus that changed the firmware on the read heads of the disk drive. That was from a circulated disk.

I do not get the Service packs as soon as they are available, there are always issues. Everything from Video card issue to broken tcp/ip stacks.

Waiting an addition 6 months really sin't going to change your risk.

Yes, I periodically scan my computers. I never had a resident virus scanner until I got AVG do to a requirement from a contract I had.
It's never found anything either.
Regular port monitoring never shows any unexpected activity or connections.

I think the biggest reasons for this, compared to others, isn't just a firewall and a switch/router but the fact that my wife and kids are good computer users.

Oh look a service pack for windows!!!!!

[dgun]

Let's download it right now!!!!

:|

Some people never learn.

Re:installing SP3

[...charc...]

It was one of the choices in my automatic update this morning when I booted my computer.

Re:installing SP3

[geekoid]

Yes I consider it 'broken', but this is about risk analysis.
Based on the history of SP releases, you have less of a risk waiting 30 days to see how things shake out then you do with an immediate install.

Failed to work for me....

[UttBuggly]

...when I attempted to install it on a standard Compaq Evo N610c laptop. Other than a 2nd NIC installed in a card slot, this is a vanilla machine with IE7 and Office 2003.

The SP downloaded and began the install just fine. Ran all the way to the end, which took over 2 hours, and then popped up a dialog after reboot that the installation "...has failed and will be rolled back. This is a two-step process..."

Pressed OK and it took about 45 minutes and a reboot to finish. After boot, I got the "your system has encountered a serious error" dialog. So far, everything SEEMS normal, but I haven't done much as this is my 3rd PC, hence his starring role as "SP3 sacrificial lamb".

Disappointed, but not particularly surprised this SP has issues.

Re:Failed to work for me....

[jskline]

On my Compaq EVO N610c, it installed just fine. It did take a similar amount of time; nearly 2 hours, but no strangeness. At the end of it, I had to reboot so I did and it came back up and ran fine. One gig RAM and 40gb hdd. Nothing special.

It does appear however to have trashed the partitions on my external USB drive. I can't mount any of them and I'm waiting until later to test more before I conclude that removable drives are not working under SP3.

Re:Failed to work for me....

[UttBuggly]

Wow...same exact config; 1GB and 40GB HDD.

The ONLY thing that makes sense is the corporate mandated LanDesk agent or Windows domain policy or something else Microsoft couldn't test or account for toasted the install.

So, in fairness to MS, my Evo is not quite plain vanilla as I stated. Still, it's nothing that out of the ordinary for any business use Windows machine.

I can't afford a disaster with my monster PC I do the bulk of my job with, so I'm going to talk to PC Support and see if they're testing SP3 on our standard build image. We have about 40,000 PCs and laptops across the company, so I imagine this is on their agenda already.

Might test some of the PCs at home this weekend...they're no sweat to burn down and reload, unless SP3 trashes MY external USB drives! Thinking I'll unhook those puppies first, and the SATA ones as well.

It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out.

Hey, me too!

[khasim]

Hey, me too!

And I have to agree that since the advent of LiveCD's (and modern packaging systems) the entire process has gotten so easy that there is no excuse to NOT repair a Linux installation.

Linux is designed so that if you can boot the box, you can (99.999% of the time) fix the problem. Whether you boot with floppy, CD, DVD or USB ...

Recently I was bitten by the Ubuntu libc bug in beta. No problem! Boot the LiveCD, grab the package, follow some simple instructions and you're back up and working.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=722886
Skip to the last page. There's a LOT of discussion of that.

Re:installing SP3

[plague3106]

This is actually not true. Every service pack ever released before XP-SP2 did not have major new features. It has always been the MS policy to use Service Packs as patches-only.

Not true. People have been complaining that MS was adding features in services packs since NT 4.0. Unless you're limiting MS OS' to XP, which only had one SP prior to SP2.

So, technically they may have always had the policy, but they hadn't been following it prior to Xp / 2000.

Microsoft was REALLY not going to release those features as a service pack. There were going to release it as a NEW OS VERSION! (Imgine what people on /. would be saying here if they had done that?)

Which is where many would argue that new features belong; in a new OS. /.ers that complain the loudest seem to be the most ignorant; it's hard to justify new features in an SP for enterprise customers, because they admins have to learn them, learn what problems the features may cause, etc. That was just the problem with NT 4 SPs, as the article I linked shows.

Jim Allchin insisted that Microsoft needed to improve it's security image and that the features should be released as a free service pack.

Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that MS WAS putting new features into SPs prior to SP2 for XP.

You are right though, you will likely never see another service pack like SP2.

I dunno; the major security problems in XP, Vista, Server 2003+ seem to be addressed, so there's likely no need. I tend to think that the adding the new features in XPSP2 was a good idea, because security in XP was pretty broken, and something needed to be done.

acceptable state of affairs

[jd142]

It became the way to do things when ghosting and imaging and network speeds all got good enough to work together. I can spend hours trying to run down why one computer out of 100 identical computers is having a problem or I can push the image down with ghost and have it back up and running in about 20 minutes, assuming the problem isn't actual hardware failure. I've got better things to do with my time and the end user gets a faster answer.

It's different if all computers of a class are having identical problems, but for the one offs, just image it and get on with things.

Installed on my IE8 system

[Coffeesloth]

Of course its a virtual PC for evaluating IE8 but it installed fine and I've not had any problems yet...

I guess vista is good enough now...

[McNihil]

so botching as many XP installs to make people shift to Vista is in Microsoft's and their shareholders best interest.

I see this as nothing more than business as usual, bate and switch.

SP3 breaks older version of Via Hyperion drivers

[Verteiron]

Installing SP3 on my compy here at work broke the older Via Hyperion drivers I was running, specifically the AGP/PCI bridge. That had the effect of disabling my video drivers as well as hibernation support. Fortunately, just downloading and installing the newest Hyperion drivers fixed that.

Other than that I haven't seen any problems.

Imaging

[darthservo]

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?

At the office, I can have a Windows machine formatted and ready with the necessary installed software and drivers within roughly 30-40 minutes thanks to sysprep and imaging. If a system is hosed so badly that it will take over an hour to troubleshoot and fix, generally it is a better trade-off on reimaging than having to work with the issue. The biggest consideration is, "How much will the user be affected if they cannot retain this current configuration?"

Maybe a better question would be, "Why is it that systems can get hosed to the point that IT uses format/reinstalling as method of repair?"

To be fair...

[sco_robinso]

A casual yum update has broken various Linux servers of mine over the years. I'm usually a lot more careful doing yum updates than I am with Windows updates - not because one is inherently more destructive than the other, but because there's almost always a variety of one-off packages that it can break. Microsoft's casual [security] updates are usually fine, but even their service packs don't seem to break too much.

As usual, a couple XP installations get broken and there's mass histeria.

I am happy with it

[i4u]

My system is working very well after the upgrade. XP feels better with XP SP3. I can imagine though that lots of XP users have all kinds of stuff installed over the years and this SP is a major update that can have many side effects.

Not unique to Windows

[rickb928]

"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.

Re:Not unique to Windows

[toddestan]

BTW, tag that admission *honest*. A rarity for Microsoft, and typical that they would exercise it in an admission of OS security failure.

That's actually pretty good advice. Try asking someone what they would do with a Linux box that had been rooted. They'll most likely tell you to nuke it and restore the data from backups. It's incredibly difficult to confirm that the machine is actually disinfected, and there's always a chance you missed something. It's almost always easier just to start over.

Re:installing SP3

[kalirion]

Automatic update can be configured to automatically install any new critical updates, right? Or does it only do it for some of them?

Reinstall...

[GNUPublicLicense]

... your viruses and pieces of spyware! SP3 broke them! Well, wait for the next auto update of your prefered virus and spyware (without your consent of course!), it will fixe everything and your computer will be a nice zombie again.

It's the "Microsoft Solution".

[gr3y]

This is the status quo. How many times have you called the help desk to report a problem, only to have them tell you to reboot? When you call the company that made your computer, and you're in the queue waiting to speak to someone, in their litany of instructions you will hear the following: "Please reboot your computer".

When did the "Microsoft Solution" become commonplace? When Microsoft managed to convince the people who use their software that the expectation that their information technology infrastructure will be reliable is unreasonable.

Several factors contribute to this problem: disclaimer of fitness for an intended purpose, lack of liability, a software ecosystem that has relied for far too long on "experts" who haven't read the book that came with their certification, and a lack of any real measure of lost productivity due to poor information technology decisions, in general. And Microsoft has been able to use its dominant position to stave off market forces. The market isn't making Microsoft's software better, and neither is Microsoft.

But good luck getting management or anyone else making a purchasing decision to embrace the idea that a software company should be at least as responsible as any company that manufactures a real, physical product for the quality of their product.

People are stupid.

[Winders Vs. LineUX]

My Regular None tech friends are normally too stupid to update their OS so they wont have this problem.

omg

[Toreo asesino]

it totally thrashed my computer, now won't start at all - constant BSOD's. Also, there's a burning smell coming from the back of the tower; I could swear its killed the fan on the cpu too. Oh, and it constantly leaves the toilet seat up now when it goes to the loo, and keeps looking at my girlfriend's ass.

Fucking Microsoft.

*shakes fist*

Re:omg

[Sectrish]

Strangely, you only lost me when you said girlfriend. Good anti-Microsoft rant for the rest, though.

Re:installing SP3

[petermgreen]

SP2 was far from fine, it broke a lot of popular software including the version of nero I had at the time and attempting to install it on an unclean machine would often completely break the windows install.

Is MS trying to kill XP with SP3?

[jkrise]

So many hoops to jump through, before a decent working setup in a corporate setting. But our sysadmins thankfully, aren't doing Automatic Update; because Corporate Intranet apps and Moddle have been working decently only with IE6.

But Vista is much worse despite all these attempts by Microsoft to rubbish XP.

Sabotage?

[gebbeth]

Could this be MS trying to reduce the stability of XP to lower it to the levels of XP, thus making Vista look better in comparison to XP? I mean when their inherently planned obsolecence of XP didn't fall into place as they had planned, perhaps they are taking matters into their own hands.

That's odd...

[amake]

...because there is almost never a reason to do a clean install rather than an archive & install, which replaces the system while leaving your data untouched.

Official MS IE Blog and XP SP3

[antdude]

Bcastner's Broadband/DSL Reports forum thread shares Jane Maliouta's IEBlog about Microsoft Windows XP SP3 and how it'll work with the various released versions of Internet Explorer (v6.0 to 8.0 beta 1).

Also, this is another why you shouldn't upgrade right away, especially major upgrades. SP3 is not urgent. I am just going to wait until MS or something else forces me to upgrade to it. I am fine with SP2 and MS is still supporting it for a while (no idea when it ends).

Re:installing SP3

[...charc...]

Yes, you can configure automatic updates to install updates automatically. However your choices are:

• Automatically downlaod recommended updates for my computer and install them
• Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.
• Notify me but don't automatically download or install them.
• Turn off automatic updates.

I have mine set for the third option

"Hundreds of complaints?"

[CatOne]

With hundreds of millions of users, if the rate were one in 1,000,000 you could get hundreds of complaints.

Of course, I don't know how many people have installed it yet so it's tough to say, but Windows is used on so many systems with so many configurations (many of them rather shonky) that it's really tough to get an accurate feel from Internet reports.

I mean, Apple's Leopard release also had some "sky is falling" reports on Apple's forums, but I talked to few if any people that had issues personally. But on the Internet everyone has a voice, and it tends to be only the ones that have problems speak up.

That said, I don't see reason to install XP SP 3 in my Fusion VM instances of Windows any time soon.

SP3 made my mouse/sound jerky!

[Zaurus]

On my MacBook Pro in my Bootcamp partition, installing SP3 made my mouse constantly jerk (freeze for 1/4second every second) and caused similar disruptions to my audio.

Anyone else experience that?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=481457

Re:installing SP3

[engine matrix]

'Insightful'? Someone is an idiot for not immediately installing a Microsoft service pack? Hahahahahahahaha.

Awesome !

[Assoupis]

Should what all evil corporations do: destroy whatever they done good, leaving the place for democratic, open and better grassroot initiatives. Thanks a lot Ballmer !

Microsoft messing with XP, making it worse...

[jkrise]

Windows XP has been around for more than 5 years on Millions of PCs worldwide. Naturally, there's gonna be heel a lot of configs out there.

But the SP3 tinkers with fundamental things like network drivers, antivirus software, IE browser security model etc. Looks like MS is making XP worse, in order to make Vista look better in comparison. A futile effort, in my opinion.

An fix is expected shortly from MS.....

[too2late]

a patch that upgrades you to vista

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[whyde]

Wow, so YOU'RE the other person who's seen that movie.
I thought the clerk at VideoRama was lying to me.

One reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Better application compatibility. Some of my older games worked in Windows XP right out of the box. In Windows 2000, you would have to download some toolkit and mess with some settings before they ran properly.

My experience

[holiggan]

I've installed SP3 on 4 Windows boxes, and I didn't had any troubles at all. But then again, I try to keep those systems tweaked and optimized, and I practice "safe browsing", so they were prety healthy to begin with. Of course, your millage may vary.

Anyway, there are ways to troubleshoot a Windows box, like reading the events on the event log, seeing the code numbers on the blue screen errors, and so on, but it's a lot easier to just bash the system than to actualy try to fix things, I guess.

Re:Anyone else thinking that MS wants to kill off

[theurge14]

Well, Wikipedia does try to stay current and Vista has been the current version of Windows for almost a year and a half.

SP3 has definite issues

[Zod000]

In my company 4 IT/IS employees decided to test SP3 to make sure it was good to push out to our update server. Every single person had at least some issues, I was one of them. One programmer was never able to boot again after SP3 was installed. I had intermittent BSoDs that appeared due to newer versions of certain dll files, and the two others has a hand full of minor issues which prevented them from doing certain job functions (remote desktop broke for one). Just be careful before deciding to upgrade if you have a choice.

Vista finally better than XP

[bugs2squash]

After the progress made with XP-SP3, it is expected that with the upcoming XP-SP4, Vista will finally be a big improvement over XP and everyone will be pleased to upgrade.

Re:installing SP3

[geekoid]

I thought A lot of that software was using undocumented functionality? Just in case you don't know, undocumented functionality means it can go away or change at any time.

I know that caught me once.

Not to excuse MS for creating undocumented functionality.

Honestly, I don't remember. I only run XP at work, and 2000 at home for games.

Remind me again...

[Kazoo the Clown]

exactly what is there in XP SP3 that I might actually *want*?

can't downgrade to IE6

[Tumbleweed]

Wow, MS did something right for once - Somebody call the press!

Let's hope they do the same with IE8; can't downgrade to IE7 or 6. Ever.

Don't forget...

[Enderandrew]

Visual Themes, IMAPI support, more built-in apps like Windows Movie Maker, DirectX 9.0c, WIA, Power Management, Prefetcher, etc.

Vista Transformation Pack

[Enderandrew]

http://www.windowsxlive.net/index.php?id=16

Re:installing SP3

[kalirion]

I think my grandparent's computer is set for the first option.... Wonder if I should stop by and disable it before more damage is done. Then again, it should be relatively clean (refurbished computer from a retail store, only driver changes have been latest Intel graphics and a web camer.)

new plan

[TRRosen]

If you can't fix vista...Break XP

Brilliant

[slashdotlurker]

That is one way to boost Vista adoption rates.

Can't make Vista better ? No problem. Lets just screw Windows XP.

Re:Issue Specifics [HP and AMD]

[quaero_notitia]

No problems with my Intel processor based systems, but blue screens at bootup on all of my HP and AMD processor systems. The fix is to boot into safe mode, change one value in the registry, reboot and viola! I'm back in business. Even granny could do it. That's probably why Microsoft failed to mention it. ;) Oh, my Vista SP1 install on HP took six reboots and about two and a half hours. It failed the first three times. I'm going to make some money from these service packs!

Did several - no problems.

[MikeFM]

I did several upgrades and didn't have any problems. Of course all my Windows machines are virtual machines (VMWare) so maybe that is why I had such good luck. I used my snapshot feature but didn't need to revert at all.

Re:Did several - no problems.

[Fez]

I've put SP3 on about 10 machines and counting, and my laptop was the only problematic one.

I'm sure it was a fluke, but I'm still holding off on doing SP3 on my wife's PC until I have verified that her backups are up-to-date.

Re:Remember a bad Kathleen Turner movie

[jonaskoelker]

You're a fan-boy of murder for hire. But all I got was this lousy file system.

Re:Anyone else thinking that MS wants to kill off

[hey!]

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.

Here is the main fix (seriously) - it's GDI32.dll

[Electric Eye]

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned here yet. I ran into this problem on two completely different machines in teh past few weeks and this fixed both of them. The problem has to do with the GDI32.dll file in SP3. I have no f*cking idea what that file does, but that's the culprit.

I don't recall where I got teh following fix, but it works. You can thank me later.

====
The solution is to restore the GDI32.dll from the service pack into Windows system folder with the following steps:

      1. Boot from a Windows CD or BartPE.
      2. At Welcome to Setup screen, press "R" to start repair option and open up a Recovery Console's command prompt window.
      3. Select the Windows installation to use, normally is C:\Windows and just one option. If so, press "1 and hit Enter.
      4. If prompted for administrator password, enter the password (normally blank) and hit Enter.
      5. Make a backup of existing GDI32.dll in system folder with following command:

            REN C:\Windows\System32\GDI32.dll C:\Windows\System32\GDI32.dll.orig

            Replace "C" of the drive letter of your Windows installation drive if necessary.
      6. Then copy backup GDI32.dll from c:\windows\servicepackfiles\i386\gdi32.dll to the system folder with the following commands:

            copy C:\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\GDI32.dll C:\Windows\System32\GDI32.dll

            Replace "C" with your own system drive letter if applicable.
      7. Restart computer.

Re:Here is the main fix (seriously) - it's GDI32.d

[Electric Eye]

I forgot to mention this fixes the reboot loop.

Re:A steady trend of less user control.

[somersault]

I hate all those companies that sell non free crap. Why should I pay them for the decades of developer time that they pay for when creating their software? Grrrrrrr

My real-life test

[jskline]

I just installed it on a duplicate machine to the one I am using now.

I did not encounter booting issues as others have complained about. The machine appears to function normally. No real visible signs of change except the Service Pack 3 identifier in the system applet.

I did have a 500gb external USB2 hard drive attached and it now appears that both partitions have been destroyed on it. I put it on another machine and looked at it, and at this point, it's unreadable. I will later try and see if I can mount it and examine under Linux.

Don't use it if you have external media!

Every time you install sp3 a puppy dies

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I installed SP3 and my external HDD died, I know it's about 4 years old and makes a grinding sound, but it was SP3 that did it.

My friend installed SP3 and his system crashed. Apparently it had some kind of virus on it, and upgrading to SP3 caused it to crash, Microsoft should make SP3 compatible with his virus. I'm starting a letter campaign.

My boss installed SP3 and his network stopped working. Granted, the cable fell out, but it's obvious that SP3 must have caused the problem.

Someone I know installed sp3 and their dog got run over by a car, RIGHT after he rebooted. It's obviously SP3 at work.

Thousands of people have installed sp3 and at least 100+ are having problems, this is obviously sp3's fault, because no one ever screws up their computer.

Wow.... follow the directions?

[Plekto]

It works fine for me.

Read the white paper about SP3.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/7/687484ed-8174-496d-8db9-f02b40c12982/Overview%20of%20Windows%20XP%20Service%20Pack%203.pdf

From what I can tell, the problem is that it's conflicting with networking drivers, which are a kludge in a lot of cases. Of the changes, five of the eight are networking and permissions based, and my guess is that the machines with problems are either:

A:Not running the latest .Net framework.
B:They are using some half-baked onboard networking adapter that the company in question needs to upgrade the drivers on. That a lot of the complaints seem to be coming from laptops points to a likely problem with non-compliant hardware and drivers.

Doubly so since a clean install seems to fix it for many people. I'd recommend if your machine is having a problem, try turning the built-in networking off in the BIOS.

I have a modern PCIe ASUS motherboard and everything works perfectly. I made sure that before I applied the patch that I was up to date with every previous patch and had upgraded windows media, Java, direct X, my drivers, and .net to the latest stable versions. The install took a few minutes since everything in the patch was pretty much already installed and working beforehand.

Oh - I run XP Pro. This version seems to have less issues from what I can tell, which isn't surprising, really.

Dear participants of the SP3 public beta,

[Nullav]

Thank you for both warning and revenue.
Signed, the participants of the SP2 public beta.

I've been testing it for more than a week

[The Second Horseman]

So far, no real issues. Also, no real compatibility problems, even with software that isn't "supported" under SP3. There may be issues with specific hardware, but it's not like Apple hasn't had issues (Panther upgrade wiping out external firewire drives ring a bell with anyone?). Yes, I'm sure that some computers - of all of the Windows XP systems that have shipped during the last (almost) 7 years - are going to have problems. And depending on who used earlier betas and release candidates, some hardware hasn't been tested yet. Sure, if you've got a configuration issue, a certain device driver version, etc. you might hit a problem nobody has run into before. If you're not willing to put up with something going wrong, don't rush to install a service pack for any piece of software, unless it addresses a problem you're seeing or a potential security vulnerability. Even if the vendor offers it to you.

Re:Why should you pay for what is free elsewhere?

[somersault]

Whoah.. it was a joke *shrug* o_0 this is twitter I'm replying to..!

I use OS X for OSey stuff, and my PS3 for games these days, I'm pretty happy with that thanks :) I use XP at work, and have had to deal with Vista on slight occasion since I am the IT guy :p There is plenty of decent free stuff out there, but I don't want to get rid of the games industry or any other software industry that thrives on non-free software either.. well... maybe the antivirus industry

Re:installing SP3

[ROMRIX]

I ran with no service pack at all for years and had no problems. I only went to SP2 for USB 2.0 functionality.

A hacked machine doesn't always create problems for the user. Service packs offer greater security against hacks, attacks and someone taking control of your machine and using it without your knowledge to do nefarious things to others. You should always install the latest Service pack before connecting to the internet. (Latest Stable Service pack).
And no, I don't work for Microscrote. Just offering some friendly advice.

Re:run as not vista only

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

Way to misread my post. The MS instructions say to go to Run As Administrator, not to go to Run As... and then select the admin account. That's Vista only. Not to mention the vista-only file that it tells you to modify. As for antivirus, it wasn't even the problem. The problem was registry permissions on certain keys.

SP3 could make me wealthy

[BanjoBob]

No, seriously, I've had lots of calls today from people with post SP3 problems. These are not computer people -- they're my neighbors and friends and such. While the techies and the gurus understand Windoze, Micro$oft expects the common user to also. Well, Mr. Balmer, they don't! Take my neighbor, a retired military finance officer. He had the misfortune of installing SP3 on to his computer Wednesday and he hasn't used it since. Out of desperation, he called me.

Short story. He called the computer store and they told him to call Microsoft. Microsoft told him to search the Internet. What?!? He can't get on his computer so how is he going to get onto their web site? Typical of today's so called service.

I asked him to boot to safe mode and uninstall SP3 and then rollback to his previous state. He didn't understand.

What we have is hundreds of millions of users out there that are not computer people trying to look at their photos, send some E-mails to friends & family, look up stuff on the Internet.... They don't want to know computers any more than they want to know how to service their fuel injected multi-valve engine in their car. It isn't their world.

The real issue is, however, even computer savy people are getting burned by SP3. If these people can't get it to work right, how does Microsoft expect the common user to do it?

The local store here charges $200 to do a data recovery and reinstall. If I chared that, I would have made over $2000 just today! I was feeling good and didn't charge my friends but, what are their options in today's world? Nothing good when this sort of thing happens. Many of these common users don't even know about safe mode. Some systems don't come with CDs as the install is on the primary hard drive.

Microsoft wants everybody, including the millions of non-tech savy people to use their product but these people are incapable of doing anything but spending money and time when this sort of thing happens. Not a good place to be.

Shadow Copy only useful for versioning (default)

[SuperKendall]

The biggest problem with Shadow Copy from a backup standpoint, is that by default it's saving to the same disk as your data!

Thus it's fine for versioning (though the interface to use it is not as nice or obvious) but it does nothing for you if you lose a drive.

Time Machine makes it really easy by assuming any external drive you connect may want to be a TM volume, until you accept one or turn off TM.

Yes you can configure Shadow Copy differently but in past versions of OS X I could also setup rsync for backups too, it doesn't mean that many people did.

Technically Vista has the same feature but I'd bet a far larger percentage of users are actually using (and being saved by) Time Machine.

Not net drivers -- security software

[BanjoBob]

Microsoft is telling people that the problem has to do with script blocking by various security/anti-virus/ad-malware products that are installed.

They say you need to uninstall your security software (McAfee, Norton, Symantec, ...) BEFORE you install SP3. Then, you may reinstall your security software. While on the phone with one of their Indian or Pakistani speaking reps, they never once mentioned anything about network card, adaptors, drivers, .net, etc. It was all security product related.

Re:Not net drivers -- security software

[Plekto]

Yes, I know what their minimum wage drones say, but the fact is that I took the precautions of upgrading all of the .net and drivers and such and it worked fine. Most of the changes appear to have to do with security, and networking, so it seemed like a logical precaution.

I also suspect that XP Pro has been extensively tested and other versions may be less than 100% compatible. People are reporting that it's messing up their networking and built-in peripherals are no longer functional, especially on laptops, so it's obviously not Norton running or any other nonsense.

I was running Bit Defender, Zone Alarm, Spybot, and Spy Hunter all at once and it installed fine - I just ignored the popup windows as usual. It did pop up about a dozen "allow this change" messages, which I did.

That "uninstall security software" is similar to the typical nonsense that you get with ISP support calls.d It's because they are reading from a script.

"Yes, I double checked the DNS. Yes, I ran a traceroute. Yes, I can see and log into the router.. Yes, I rebooted the modem..."

Five minutes of B.S. to get them to bother to check that the problem is on their end.

Re:A steady trend of less user control.

[Uncle Focker]

It's a pretty sad day when twitter uses AC to defend himself rather than a sockpuppet.

OT?

[binarybum]

in other pertinent news, research shows several dozen people dislike cheese - my second cousin, doug, is blogging this hot story now.

Downgrade from IE7 to IE6?

[haeger]

In my not so humble opinion anyone who have a choice and still use the abomination that is IE6 should be flogged in public and made to apologize for the sin of being in the lower quartile of the IQ scale.

Anything is better than IE6. Anything! (with the possible exception of previous versions of IE).

The sooner it dies the better. And in my again not so humble opinion it should be shot, buried, dug up, shot again, sprinkled with holy water, buried and forgotten about.

.haeger

BootCamp disk space issue solved!

[zerofoo]

There is an issue with XP Service Pack 3 when installing on a Mac with BootCamp. During the free disk space check, the SP3 installer reports that there is not enough free diskspace.

The fix is a quick registry edit:

Create a regkey(REG_SZ) (String Value) called BootDir under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup and set the value to C:\

Reboot, and then proceed with the SP3 install. That little bit of knowledge cost $295.00 and 3 hours of my time.

-ted

Re:installing SP3

[plague3106]

What history are you looking at? I've been applying all updates as they come for some time now (years), including service packs. So far, so good. The preceived problem is exaggerated because you only hear about the people that are having problems, but the people that AREN'T having any issues don't typically say anything.

We solved the problem.

[mightybaldking]

Turning off Symantec Endpoint Protection solved the upgrade hassles for us. But it was really ugly until we thought of that trick.

YMMV.

Havoc? They made it Vista Compatible!

[lhen218]

Windows XP SP3 is now compatible with Windows Vista

No problems here

[SpryGuy]

I installed it without incident. Very smoothly in fact. Quick too. Absolutely no XP SP3 problems for me.

And who in their right mind would ever want to downgrade from IE7 to IE6?!? If you aren't running IE7, you should be running FireFox or any of the others. NOBODY should be using IE6 at this point. So not being able to downgrade from IE7 to IE6 is hardly a "problem"... in fact, I'd consider it a *feature*.

Two OSs that compete

[Anomalyst]

"compete", I don't think that word means what you think it means.

The trick is ...

[golodh]

you have to make sure you aren't the first or even among the first to install Miscrosoft software. So shy away from anything Microsoft named "1.0", or even "x.0".

It doesn't matter if we're talking about OS, tools, Office, or service packs. You should *always* let somebody else go first, and wait for an "x.1" version.

FWIW I've installed it fine on 2 machines.

[AbRASiON]

Seems to be working ok for me - I can't really spot any serious changes.
Even if they did take out the address bar (down the bottom) it's still better than Vista as far as I'm concerned.

Re:A steady trend of less user control.

[pxc]

Me, too. In fact, I hate crap in general.

Nothing new to me....

[twebb72]

I had to reload xp to remove IE7. This is nothing new.

No problems here

[Dunrobin]

FWIW, I installed SP3 on my machine the other day without a hitch, and I haven't experienced any problems since then, either. I'm running on an AMD Athlon 64 Processor, 2.2 GHz, with 512 Mb RAM.

Damn you all

[unity100]

one should never try to challenge the collective mind of the /.

so now you moderated this obvious junk moderation sink parent post insightful ?

YOU WON THIS ROUND SLASHDOT !! BUT YOU'LL RUE THE NEXT !!!

Microsoft's reply...

[okmijnuhb]

..."See? We told you Vista was better than XP!"

Stability and recovery

[Douglas Goodall]

A friend at Microsoft told me that he was responsible for keeping development machines running for his department. He said that developer's machines crashed all the time and he had a shopping cart full of imaged drives to plop into troubled machines. Data is kept on servers and if a local operating system gets trashed, its too much trouble to diagnose or fix it. Just pop in a new drive and away you go. This is one of the reasons I quit doing Windows development. I got tired of reloading my development machines. If you want to be ready with your product for the window of opportunity, you need to run on beta os, with beta tools, and beta applications/services. It is too easy for the system to become unstable. Things are almost as bad for the public end-users. This is one reason I don't fix people's Windows machines. Boredom.

SP3 vis a vis IE8

[sydbarrett74]

Funny, I have IE8 beta on my XP machine and have installed SP3 with no problems at all...

A cunning plan....

[BigBadBus]

....to force people to switch to Vista?

what a bunch of bs

[stylemessiah]

Heres yet more proof that the collective IQ in the world is sinking.

What do you expect if you try and install SP3 over a machine thats been running SP2 for god knows how long and picking up gunk from the internet etc, slowly corrupting drivers etc.

Any sane person, and im one of them, would slipstream SP3 into the original release and install that fresh....

So after doing this i have:

• No issues.
• Speedier startup and the long delay in shutting down is gone.
• All my drivers work and i have some hardware in this thing, no issues.
• Less notices in event viewer than i actually had using SP2 in the last few years.

The one thing i had to do was download IE7 off the net, i tried using the one from AutoPatcher (how i loved thee), but it wouldnt install. Other than this its been brilliant.

So the person who started this topic and the pages around the net are proof that a certain segment of people will always try and do things the hard. I never thought id say this, but stop blaming Microsoft, they did their job and SP3 is fine. Again some people just like the sound of their own voice in internet forums, and for once its not me, its the incompetent whingers that post this crap about SP3, take some ownership you mental midgets....i suspect most of the whingers are also the ones without valid product keys too................

It's an OS error

[darkmasterchief]

Microsoft: "Your computer has become obsolete, and it's very vulnerable. Update your Operating System to Windows Vista to fix this problem"

Oh noes!

[OMNIpotusCOM]

Hundreds of complaints? Hundreds? How many installs of XP are there still? Don't make me laugh.

Get off your soapbox and stop twittering drivel to this site.

You're selling someone else's line.

[Calledor]

I realize a lot of big craporations release games that need to be patched later because of shoddy production, but you can go ahead and flux yourself on the old "consoles are better quality because they HAVE to work" crap. Comparing old school PC games to cartridge based consoles is apples to retard babies. You'd patch the game because the system changed not because the game was released not up-to-snuff. The more the OS changes/sucks the harder a game dev. team has to work to make sure it doesn't bork, and it's the reason they want you to report every crash. It's the difference between dancing on a hard wood floor or a jenga tower. The latter being more exciting but more likely to involve catastophic failure.

Screen rotation issue too

[Wayne247]

This is a comment I posted on a similar story, but also applies to this one.

That's not the only issue with SP3. One of my monitors is rotated 90 degrees (widescreen that I use upright), thanks to the ATI driver's rotate function.

After rebooting following SP3 install, all my monitors went completely berzerk. They fell back to 4 bits colors (I didn't even know there WAS a 4 bit mode), with some weird effects. Also, rotation was not possible.

It took me about an hour to find a way to bring back monitors to decent resolution and colors. I still couldn't get rotation to work, no matter how hard I tried (Combination of card, drivers, update from ATI, etc)

Then finally I google a bit and found a few forums with user complaints of the same type of problem. So I uninstalled SP3, rebooted, and voilà, everything back to normal.

Needless to say, I promply logged back into WSUS and removed SP3 from the approved for installed list.

Microsoft is Dying

[SuperX3]

Your comment that Microsoft is dying will be proven to be true I believe. I can't help seeing them continually try to catch up in a vain attempt at me-toism. If they had a leader with vision and technical understanding of the industry they would have never contemplated Vista or anything remotely like it. What Microsoft needs to bring it back from the brink is a Steve Jobs, a man with vision with excitement for things technical, simple and elegent.