Survey Shows Admins Avoiding SP2

bonch writes "Tom's Hardware Guide is running an article about Windows XP Service Pack 2 and its limited acceptance by IT administrators. AssetMetrix is cited in the article as reporting that fewer than 24% of over 136,000 Windows XP PCs in 251 North American corporations even had SP2 installed. THG goes on to describe the reasons given by admins and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of installing SP2."

Re:They have good reasons to avoid SP2

[Anonymous Coward]

It breaks a whole bunch of apps.

Crap. It breaks really old versions of a number of apps.

Those apps are mostly broken themselves, e.g. they deliberately try to execute from a stack where SP2 has no-execution protection on the stack. You can disable no-execution protection if you really must run those versions of those apps, there's a KB about it.

Re:Simple...

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Only ones I have seen on the list Microsoft publishes have been programs that need access through Windows Firewall. Sometimes it's easy to fix it....most times it isn't. Windows Firewall woul dbe MUCH better if:

It let you open the ports you need, with plenty of warning message of what may/may not happen.

Do more active scanning of the packets coming in and going out for malicious packets.

Windows Firewall is not enough in someways, but too much and not fine grained enough in control in other ways.

Re:Simple...

[GraemeDonaldson]

This is probably because of the restrictions MS has added to limit concurrent incomplete TCP connection attempts. You probably have a whole bunch of 4226 events in your system log.

From technet [microsoft.com] article:

The TCP/IP stack now limits the number of simultaneous incomplete outbound TCP connection attempts. After the limit has been reached, subsequent connection attempts are put in a queue and will be resolved at a fixed rate. Under normal operation, when applications are connecting to available hosts at valid IP addresses, no connection rate-limiting will occur. When it does occur, a new event, with ID 4226, appears in the system's event log.

See here [lvllord.de] for a fix.

Re:Whoa..first post?

[Anonymous Coward]

After I installed SP2, I found that a lot of things started crashing (just applications, not system crashes). I eventually realised the problem was that my CPU has an NX bit, and SP2 had enabled it. Once I disabled it, all the problems went away.

I'd like to have the NX bit enabled to improve security, but it's not worth it if it causes so much software to crash. The thing that worries me is that most people wouldn't have a clue about any of this, so would just be stuck with a choice between crashing applications or removing SP2.

Re:XP SP2 sucks for p2p?

[KiloByte]

I've once written a piece of code that probes all addresses on the local class C subnet, looking for the MySQL server. Yeah, this is a lame-ish solution, but it's much better than trying to explain what an "IP address" or even "server name" is to your average accounting drone.

On 98: the limit of available TCP sockets is pretty low, but Windows will tell your program that the call failed. Ok.
On XP SP1: the limit of available sockets is a lot higher. Everything works fine.
On XP SP2: Windows will start _10_ or so connections, and then lie to your process that the extra connections are pending... They won't actually start until after the first 10 completed and/or timed out.

The above means, on an XP SP2 box, you can't do a legitimate scan faster than 10 IPs/120 seconds, and this pretty much broken down my installer. The alternative, having to ask someone competent what the server is and typing the address in was pretty unviable due to the customer company lacking enough competent IT people.

Win admins are RETARED then?

[Anonymous Coward]

may cause BSsOD when non-compliant programmes are used.

Have you not read this [slashdot.org] yet. Also, I seem to remember a reputable article that ranked the varios Linux and Windows distros against each other. Out in front - OpenBSD, and RH Linux 9, Fedora and others not far behind, and XP SP2 not far behind those - but all secure except for a few crappy insignificant attacks. Way back down the line - XP SP1, Win 2000 - these O.S's have all been completely compromised.

Re:no comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure he's just saying that all these networks with no SP2 have been owned because they don't have SP2 yet. It's just a little joke.

Re:They have good reasons to avoid SP2

[Skye16]

That may be, but we've heard people raving for years about MS security, most of which comes down to legacy support and the inherently bad design decisions in the code that supports that. So, they're starting to fix things, slowly. We've all predicted applications aren't going to work any longer when they make the change. But that's really just too bad. We can't really have it both ways; it wasn't done right the first time, so we either get security, or we get legacy application support. Not both.

Re:Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

but i did not like the constant moaning of the os

So go to the security centre in control panel and turn it off! Jesus, it's not *that* hard. In any case, it's for your own good - you should be running AV and a firewall unless you really know what you're doing.

Here's a review of how it performs

[Madas]

What they are saying is that if you like your computing experience to be all-Microsoft this is the way to go. [scmagazine.com] Otherwise you'd be much better off with a different browser, email client and personal firewall!!

Re:I get a funny feeling

[Flywheels of Fire]

The story was the second part of an earlier article right here on slashdot [slashdot.org] and here too.

It's you. Not déjà vu.

They're misstating the facts

[Kjella]

XP Sp2 limiting the number of connection/sec

It does not. It limits the number of pending connections. The biggest problem with this in relation to p2p is that clients often report IP/ports that are unreachable due to firewall/NAT. Hit 10 of those and you can't open any more connections for a while. Also very annoying if you hit a web page where the image server is down. 10 images you can't load? Tarpitted. Personally, I've changed this long ago.

Kjella

XP SP2 is more like rolling out a new OS

[SgtChaireBourne]

XP SP2 is more like rolling out a new OS not a patch. It is more like going from NT4 to 2000 or from 2000 to XP than going from XP to XP SP1.

It's got a lot of strikes against it:

• It was late [vnunet.com]
• Lots of apps don't work with XP SP2 [microsoft.com], including some of Microsoft's own
• It's been known to be [crn.com]
• unstable [crn.com]
• Difficult to install [thechannelinsider.com]
• Additions like the firewall have serious shortcomings [eweek.com]
• It messes with settings and permissions [theregister.co.uk]
• Is still vulnerable anyway [eweek.com] in many ways [zdnet.co.uk], and it can take weeks or months to force a repair or even admission.
• Doesn't fix or remove MSIE [eweek.com]
• Has DRM features that let spammers 0wn [zdnet.co.uk] the machine

How to Kill XPSP2 Security Center Pop-Ups

[Vandil X]

1. Open up the Security Center applet in the Control Panel.

2. On the left side of the Security Center window, locate and click the "Change the way Security Center alerts me" link.

3. In the "Alert Settings" window that appears, uncheck any/all the warnings you no longer want to have pop-up when you log in.

4. Click the OK button to save your changes.

Don't laugh. Re-installing SP2 may make it work.

[Futurepower(R)]

The parent post is moderated as "Funny", but that's what happened to us. We installed SP2 on numerous machines. There were a variety of problems. Re-installing SP2 and rebooting several times often cured the problems. Sometimes it was necessary to reload the entire Windows SP2 operating system.

We troubleshot one of the problems and discovered that SP2 expects that a particular file exists on the target computer, before it has copied that file. So, if the version that was already on the target computer is not recent enough, SP2 will crash. We reported this to Microsoft, but there was only a spacey response, as though confusion reigned. Microsoft did not seem to have the capacity to respond sensibly.

SP2 has numerous fixes for problems with USB 2.0. USB operated much better for us after SP2 was installed.

Microsoft gives us the impression that the company has a sloppy management style supervising coders who are not given enough time to do a good job. If you don't install SP2, you are not giving Microsoft the opportunity to fix some of its bugs. Someone once said that the Microsoft motto was "The whole world is our beta test site." According to that, Windows XP SP2 is just the first release version of Windows XP. We had many, many time-consuming problems with the pre-SP1 version; in our opinion, it was not ready for release; it could be made to work, but it was a time-waster. Maybe it's foolish to believe that two billionaires could care what happens to the less rich.

All of our Microsoft OS computers are now using SP2 with all the most recent critical updates, with no unexplained problems for months.

Be careful with Windows XP updates other than critical updates. Someone made a mistake and updated a computer here recently with a recommended hardware driver. The name of the driver on the Windows Update web site is different from the name of the driver once installed. That computer has never had an "HP wireless keyboard" attached to it.

Re:Whoa..first post?

[Kierthos]

Oddly enough, I had the opposite happen. Okay, keeping in mind that probably 95% of what I use my computer for revolves around browsing, e-mail and games, I wasn't having that many problems before, but I was getting the occassional (like once every two or three days) complete freeze-up of World of Warcraft. After SP2 was installed, it has happened once. And that more likely had to do with me running WinAMP and a web browser at the same time, alt-tabbing between them to look up item drop rates and changing playlists.

Yes, it's not 100% perfect. No upgrade ever is. Especially considering the staggering amount of code in XP. But for some of us, it's working just fine.

Kierthos

Re:Whoa..first post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your CPU support NX? When I wrote the grandparent post, I didn't bother to think that only the most recent x86 CPUs support NX, so people with older CPUs (most people) won't run into these problems anyway.

We're on SP 2, but....

[Who drank my chocola]

...Not everybody. I still have two users that have legacy (ie. OLD AND CRAPPY) applications that were a hack to work on XP SP 0-1. I'm just not feeling like pressing my luck right now.

Of course, the people who do run SP 2 have reported exactly ZERO problems. True, I did have to reinstall Office on one lady's machine, but she also had the worst spyware/adware collection I've ever seen, so that probably had something to do with it.

Bottom line? In my experience, SP 2 is not better or worse than any other MS Service Pack. Yes, there are programs that are problematic, but mostly it works just fine. I mean, the worst issue was the pop-up blocker in IE preventing Peoplesoft from making an Excel spreadsheet, which was easily remedied by making the Peoplesoft web-server a trusted site for everybody via Active Directory Group Policy. Piece of cake.

Re:SP2 soon to be FORCED upon us...

[hconnellan]

Actually there is a way to fix it http://www.lvllord.de/?url=tools [lvllord.de]

90% installed here

[GIL_Dude]

We participated in the private betas for months and months. Found several bugs and app compat issues - got them either resolved or worked around. Shipped it to our users, and are currently at 90% of our 60,000 machines. I can't claim that there have been no problems. There have been some web sites that need work (due to some of the new restrictions in IE) and some apps that are used by only a few users that have some problems - but in the main, this has gone extremely well. I honestly can't figure out why people are waiting on this.

It seems incredibly disingenous of people to on the one hand say, "Windows is full of holes, help us here Microsoft, we are bleeding." and on the other hand say, "well, that's nice but I'd rather keep bleeding than spend the time and effort to apply the fix."

Get with the program IT Admins! Work with the vendors of the apps if you have to, get the firewall exceptions in and SHIP this already!

SP2 broke one of our vendor's products

[haplo21112]

The application we use to allow our technicians work trouble tickets through a web interface got completely hosed by SP2. They were fairly apathetic about the whole thing sending a link to a MS KB article that didn't solve the problem. There attitude was pretty much it was our fault for using SP2. I finally found a solution that involved basically hacking the registry to tun off one the SP2 security features which was breaking the products javascript.

Re:Why not linux? I'll tell you why

[Joe U]

The OSX 'drag and drop' install is mostly smoke and mirrors.

Yeah, there's an install, it's done in stages:

Stage one is when you drag the file and it copies any hidden info without showing you the details.

Stage two is when you launch the program for the first time and if it needs any configuration or personalization you set it then.

So yes, OS X has an install routine, it's just hidden from the end user.

Windows has a big button that called 'setup.exe' and shows you the details and usually asks you to configure during setup.

Either way, your software gets installed.

Re:How to Kill XPSP2 Security Center Pop-Ups

[bcmm]

Better: use "Administrative Tools/Services" to disable the Security Centre service.

Re:If you think THAT'S bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

We use Great Plains too. If you had actually done some research and realized you needed to use one of the last 2 revisions you would've been fine. :)

The MS knowledge base has nothing, correct. The Source knowledge base(Great Plains support) has lots of documentation.

Re:Security moanings

[KarmaMB84]

If I'm not mistaken Halo had difficulties on SP2 with certain video cards with 256MB of RAM and then only on certain driver version but it never killed the kernel. Halo PC was done by Gearbox and published by MS, btw.

Clue-stick please.