That Big XP Upgrade (bug fix?)

Martin

SP2 is a heavwight alright at 75 - 266Mb.

Personally I will wait before applying SP2. There is no rush IMO as in order to protect ourselves we (should) already have a personal firewall, regularly updated and run AV & Spyware scanners together with quick application of the update patches from Microsoft.

As far as SP2 goes, its too many changes in one go with too much risk of conflict with existing apps or tools.

I will SP2 in about 3 months when I have a whole day free and a good backup to hand.

Although it's avaialble for download you should almost certainly wait for it to appear on Windows Update. If you are up-to-date with your critical updates then you are not missing anyhting than cannot wait.

Matthew

I believe the XP home upgrade is available for download, but XP pro will be a week or tweo longer.

cheers, Martin

E-mail:- MartinPayne (at) Dial.Pipex.com. Put "Naim" in the title.

"I believe the XP home upgrade is available for download, but XP pro will be a week or tweo longer"

There is a 266Mb download with everything in it that can be installed to Home, Pro and MCE. The "pro specific" version will have no extra code in it and installing the full download to Pro works fine (and differently to Home).

"especially around wireless networking"

Well it completely KO'd my wireless network and it took me half a day to get it back, so YMMV.

Like I say, if you are up to date with your updates you have all the important bits anyway so you might as well wait for the Windows Update version amd let as manny peole as possible iron out the teething troubles.

Matthew

Matthew / guys thanks, i'm completely upto date at the mo minus the XP patch so I'll give it a while yet!
Martin
PS its the pro i'm waiting for

[This message was edited by Martin D on Thu 26 August 2004 at 1:23.]

Unless you're really desperate to see the new features hold off for the time being and let somebody else do Microsoft's final testing. There are some compatibility issues with it, particularly in the area of games.
The Pro version is available now and a tailored, smaller version for home is scheduled for the near future. I actually installed it quite soon after it was released but for other reasons had to rebuild my PC and left it out as the techie press was advising people to wait.

I installed SP2 on my XP Pro machine a couple of weeks ago and so far has worked flawlessly.

If you have your own firewall (zonealarm in my case) it doesn't switch on the windows one but just monitors that your own firewall is working and is up to date.

So far no issues - upgrade now

Music should be 'original' and played 'live'. No more overpaid Karaoke singers.

Well would you believe it (yes I hear you all say) the update was ready to install on my PC this morning when I looked for an email. I thought oh well here goes and installed it just now. It took about 45 mins to finish and was 111Mb. No probs at all.
Martin

Sean
111Mb over a dial-up, cant even calculate that!

It's appearing on Windows Update today and MSDN distributed it last week.

I did it because I'm reckless. No pain so far, apart from the nag about not having any anti-virus crap.

Paul

SP2 is more an update of certain features rather than bug fixes like SP1.

So far things have gone smoothly since update.

Has anyone noticed a significantly longer boot-up time after installing SP2?

My machine now takes a good 2.5 minutes to sort itself out on start-up. Before it was much less. It's a new, fast machine too, with a gig of RAM.

I have McAfee anti-virus installed; maybe that has somethign to do with it?

Everything seems to be ok with XP Pro SP2 and i'll concur with the slightly longer boot-up times. i have auto update running so the 240 mb via broadband was a scoosh.
anybody here running Windows XP 64 bit?,thinking of building a new setup with the AMD64 processor.......

dennis

I've just installed SP2 on all 3 machines at home running XP Pro. It seems to be working fine, no conflicts with any programs, and the boot up time is exactly the same as it was before, certainly not slowed in any way.

Regards
Clive

Installed SP2 and immediately discovered one area to watch out for.

If you activate all the internet security and control features you will being banning "pop up" secondary windows.
This is fine as a general thing to stop the adverts that these windows typically contain.

Problem comes if you go to a site which uses secondary "pop up" windows to display usefull information it will fail to display.

For example I went Canon because they have a series of tutorials on how to get the best from their EOS Digital cameras. The tutorials are in seconadry windows. Result with SP2 nada. Just obscure message windows which give no clue.

I only found out when I temporarily fixed it by going back to a previous XP restore point on my PC.

I gather it can be fixed in SP2 by creating a list of approved sites which can be allowed to display secondary windows but have'nt looked into that yet.

regards
GEOFF

The boring old fart

Another reason (as it another were needed) to stick with or switch to Firefox -- it's popup blocker is far more sinsible allows popups that you explicitly request via a mouse click which means almost all sites work and it still blocks 99.9% of popups.

End your IE induced misery here

Matthew

I have a security router on my DSL connection that can be administered by various means (HTTP / FTP / Telnet), but only fully controlled via HTTP.

Just recently I've noticed I cannot log into it (the browser will sit indefinitely without timing out) if it's been on a while. I assumed it was a fault due to overheating or useage. I've just got this reply from their tech support: -

"There is a known issue with Windows XP PC's that have SP2 installed. MS have updated the Universal Plug 'n' Play service within SP2 which seems to cause a universal issue with local WebGUI's on router and firewall devices.

This issue isn't specific to ***** (ID removed for security reasons ) products, many other manufacturers are suffering from the same problem. ****** and other manufacturers are working with Microsoft to resolve this issue.

We have found that with all XP PC's turned off and disconnected from the network all non-SP2 computers can then use the WebGUI without any problems."

It's true too, a shut down tonight allowed me to administer from the (linux-based) set-top box on the telly! It's not a browser thing either, its an OS thing.

Andy.

Andrew,

I've had a similar-sounding problem on occasion but it seemed to be with Zone Alarm. When I boot up all the usual stuff starts ok except Zone Alarm. The system stops responding although the mouse is not frozen. It may time out eventually but I've left it about 10 minutes and then had to push the button.