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Windows Operating Systems Software Microsoft

Windows XP SP2 Still Rough Around the Edges 613

Posted by michael from the cheese-grater dept.
Megor1 writes "According to crn.com when they tried upgrading various computers to Windows XP SP2 RC2 3 out of 5 of the machines failed to come back up, and had to have both SP1 and SP2 removed via various hacks supplied by Microsoft. Sounds like it might take a lot longer for Microsoft to release SP2 if RC2 is any sign of how far they are along."
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Windows XP SP2 Still Rough Around the Edges More

Windows XP SP2 Still Rough Around the Edges

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  • So, XP market share could drop 60%? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:48PM (#9784312)
    Neat! This is the best thing to happen to the internet in years.

  • If you're smart... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...you'll wait for XP SP3.1.

    • Microsoft magic numbers (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:52PM (#9784368)
      Joking aside, there's some truth behind Microsoft and their versions. One of the developer's had a blog that talked about it in detail.

      Essentially, version 1.0 is a best guess at what the customer wants. Version 2.0 is started even before the customer sees the 1.0 version. Finally, customer feedback is incorporated into the 3.0 version and things might actually start getting useful.

      • Re:Microsoft magic numbers (Score:5, Funny)

        by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:04PM (#9784506) Journal
        the biggest problem is that thay fail allready at step 1 : they really don't know what customers want. If they did, horrors such as clippy would never have existed.
        • Clippy only exists because Bill wanted to get into Melinda's pants.

          Fact-Index entry. [fact-index.com]

        • Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

          by rd_syringe ( 793064 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @07:40PM (#9785249) Journal
          You know what? The only people I ever see complaining about Clippy are Slashdotters who think it's still 1998, and that BSODs and Clippy are regular parts of the Windows experience.

          I haven't seen Clippy in a default Office install in five years. Whenever he did appear, I--gasp--right-clicked on him and clicked "Hide," thereby causing him to never return.

          Why do people still use criticisms from the past decade to criticize Microsoft now? I mean, really, what does Clippy have to do with SP2 RC2 causing some problems on some computers? For the record, I run SP2 RC2 on both my home machine and my laptop with no problems at all. In fact, bootup is shorter and performance overall is snappier, presumably because of all the recompiled system libraries (using the VS2005 compiler...SP1 was compiled with VS6).

          • Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)

            by One Childish N00b ( 780549 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @09:25PM (#9786054) Homepage
            Clippy might not be a common part of the Windows experience, but blue-screens are. OK, so they're not the same TYPE of blue screen (well, different layout anyway) but that white-on-blue text is still a part of Windows life.

            I've had all sorts of blue screen problems on my laptop (Compaq (I know, I know), bought from a big retail outlet, haven't put anything remotely dodgy on it... I still get all sorts of incarnations of that dreaded white-on-blue, only now it switches itself off straight after. Microsoft claiming Windows XP doesn't blue-screen is a cop-out; Turning itself off instead is not a more viable alternative, and if I see that 'Windows has recovered from a serious error' dialog one more time I will scream. but then I won't see it again, as after a month of battling numerous other problems with the infernal machine I formatted and put Linux on it.

            I'm no Linux fanboy, if XP worked as well as it CAN work all the time, I'd much prefer it to Linux, but I know the problems I had with it on my machine were it's fault because everything's working fine now.

            Just saying that problems with crashing are far from a rare experience, even with XP.

          • Re:Sigh (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Jungle guy ( 567570 ) <brunolmailbox-generico&yahoo,com,br> on Friday July 23, 2004 @09:33PM (#9786103) Journal
            No, Clippy still exists and he haunts me.

            Let me explain. I work in a big corporation, with thousans of computers, and on every single one Windows and MS office are installed. If, for some reason, I go to a different computer, log on with my username and password, and launch MS Office, the "hide assistant" setting is not there, and Clippy shows in all his glory. It has happened twice this week, for example.

            So please stop astroturfing Microsoft. They deserve every complain about Clippy.

            • Weird (Score:3, Informative)

              by sheldon ( 2322 )
              At our company, our login script will call a PERSONAL.BAT file if it exists in your user directory.

              So I have the login script change registry entry preferences for things that I find exceedingly annoying. Like now I have explorer default to detailed view, show hidden files, yada yada...

              If we had clippy showing up, that preference would have been in my personal login script.

              I take it you don't know how to do something similar?

        • Re:Microsoft magic numbers (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Except that a lot of people actually do use Clippy, at least in my experience.

          When I first started working at my current job, we were loading the Office assistant as part of the default Office installation. When we got new computers and I had to create a new Ghost image for them, I took the Office assistant out of the default install since, of course, "nobody uses it". We received so many calls from users who, upon using their new systems for the first time, could not figure out how to get the dog/globe/

      • Re:Microsoft magic numbers (Score:5, Funny)

        by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:08PM (#9784555) Homepage
        Essentially, version 1.0 is a best guess at what the customer wants. Version 2.0 is started even before the customer sees the 1.0 version. Finally, customer feedback is incorporated into the 3.0 version and things might actually start getting useful.

        Damn, they're at over 2003 tries and still can't build a server not owned by a script kiddie worm overnight. . .

  • codename (Score:5, Funny)

    by cyrl ( 741628 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:50PM (#9784338) Journal
    Windows XP SP2... codename Longhorn =)

  • umm.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by liloconf ( 560960 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:50PM (#9784342)
    Actually the computers not turning back on is one of the new security features....
  • I have a machine that is in terrible shape including some sort of registry corruption and ati driver issues. I installed SP2 last night and the machine was actually in better shape after the install...no more registry issues and less ati issues.

  • Play the odds! (Score:5, Funny)

    by gringo_john ( 680811 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:51PM (#9784355) Journal
    Hey, the article doesn't mention that 2 out of 5 machines do survive the SP2 patch.

    That's 40% and pretty decent for M$.

  • One more for the anecdotes.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:52PM (#9784373) Journal
    Installed a beta of SP2 maybe 2-3 months ago. Worked like a charm, and the new firewall is nice.
  • Don't know what happened to these guys, but it worked just as smoothly for me as my last KDE upgrade. You can try it too [microsoft.com]! That's a beta Windows Update site.
  • I don't see how they could know it was the service pack that caused the machine to fail. I just did a random test here in my office. I shut down everyone's computer, and 3 out of 5 failed to come back up again. This is normal operation, not something new introduced by the service pack.

  • Installed fine for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by raistphrk ( 203742 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:55PM (#9784418)
    I've got FreeBSD and Windows XP SP 2 running side-by-side. I installed various incarnations of SP 2, from the original technical preview, to the current release candidate. I just installed the newest private build from Microsoft yesterday. When I was using the technical preview, a lot of software - especially CD and DVD burning software - was completely borked. Now things seem to be working better.

    The improvements to Internet Explorer are really the main thing that caught my attention. Microsoft finally wisened up and started turning features like ActiveX off by default, and now has permissions completely locked down for the local computer. All I can say is, THANK GOD.

    I normally have a lot of criticism for Microsoft, but this service pack is one of the few Windows builds I have to compliment them on. They've made a lot of steps forward in terms of security. However, as long as they rely on a complex, feature-filled package by default, we're going to see security holes in the default installations of Windows.

    The real test is going to be when we roll this out hardcore at the office. Since the company has a lot of DCOM applications, I suspect many of them will break. This isn't really anything new to Linux and Unix users; when you install new libraries, you often have to recompile binaries for compatibility. However, in Windows enterprises, this is going to amount to absolute chaos - especially given that most businesses don't have access to source code to recompile.

    This service pack is a good baby step in a long journey. In the meantime, I'm going to be busy dealing with broken applications.

    • Microsoft finally wisened up and started turning features ... They've made a lot of steps forward in terms of security.

      Could someone elaborate on how making these much heralded "settings changes" can be characterized as "a lot of steps forward." I know an argument can be made with respect to the mitigating widespread problems on the internet, but it seems to me that if I habitually leave my car door unlocked (doncha just love car analogies) and my car is regularly vandalised, how does changing my habits

  • SP2 RC3 Link (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bruha ( 412869 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:56PM (#9784423) Homepage Journal
    You can download RC3 here. [linspire.com] The upgrade time is even shorter than SP2 if you do a "take over disk" method!
    • You can't crack a machine that won't boot
    • Programs can't BSOD on you
    • You'll never need to worry about spyware again
    • The screen isn't cluttered with icons
    • There's no risk to data, if the power fails
    • It keeps the writers of SP3 employed


    Besides, Microsoft's profits are up. Why should they care about the give-away freebies, if they can make more people buy stuff from them anyway?

  • Good... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pmsyyz ( 23514 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:57PM (#9784433) Homepage Journal
    Good, the longer it takes for SP2 (with its popup blocker for IE) to come out, the more time alternate web browsers (Firefox) have to gain marketshare. Popup blocking is one of the biggest selling points.
    • dude IE already has pop-up blocking...if you've installed either a Google or Yahoo toolbar. And lets not forget about NIS that has those same ad blocking features as well.

      At my work everyone has a hard on for Yahoo news and Google searching, and i've yet to see anyone here who doesn't have at least 1 of these 2 bars installed.

      So the idea that the other browsers are getting more market share "because" of IE having issues is wishful thinking - if they gain market share they will gain market share because pe

    • Re:Good... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CoolGuySteve ( 264277 )
      Ya but as soon as everyone moves to a browser with pop-up blocking, advertisers will move to something even more annoying and pop-up blocking will no longer be feature, just an unofficial standard.

      Hopefully Flash will take over since this extension already exists and works quite well:
      http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#flashblo ck [texturizer.net]
  • First off, I'll go ahead and acknowledge that this is a release candidate. However, the type of surgery that people had to do in order to recover from that BSOD is way more than what Joe Sixpack will be capable of.

    Reading the details of their methods, the rollback took out hardware drivers. Though they were able to recover all but one after a reboot, it probably would have been easier to just re-image the drive instead of having to jump hoops with rollback, registry edits, etc.

    Wonder if this is Windows

  • Now, I know that Slashdot isn't exactly a bastion of journalistic integrety.

    But couldn't you at least point out in the giant headline that this ain't 'SP2' that got tested?

    This is an unreleased, still in testing, being considered for release, but never the less, NOT released version of some software. It's EXPECTED not to work properly.

  • vmware (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bigbadwlf ( 304883 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @05:59PM (#9784451)
    I installed SP2 on a vmware virtual machine. No problems with that yet.
    Come on, I'm not crazy.

  • This is an NX bit problem (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The service pack is leaving your computer's no-execute bit set, preventing your computer from executing. To unset your computer's no-execute bit, bang your head repeatedly against your computer while saying: "Never install an MS service pack until about 6 months after its release and always have a full backup."

  • Ironic. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:04PM (#9784507)
    I find it Ironic that on Slashdot that it is considered good news that Microsoft has problems fixing security on peoples system. You would think that a technical community would want all the products to run smoothly. Because with MS having no security fixes then your network traffic is full of Microsoft Crap. See this is bad news because the general community will still have all sort of security problems with there PC costing them a lot of money. It is like a Pepsi Fan being happy that a major Coca-Cola plant blew up killing hundreds of workers. I hear a lot of Slashdotters go I just use the right tool for the right job, then when they hear that MS screwed up again then they are going hooray. I would think that they will be disappointed for having a lack of stable tools.

    No I am a long timer on Slashdot, but I just wanted to point out the Irony.

    • Re:Ironic. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by stor ( 146442 ) on Saturday July 24, 2004 @08:10AM (#9788270)
      I find it Ironic that on Slashdot that it is considered good news that Microsoft has problems fixing security on peoples system.

      Hmm? Who said that it was good news? It's just geek news.

      Of course it's also a great opportunity to say lame geeky anti-ms jokes. Geeks tend to do that. We also give lame geeky jabs to unix, linux, apple, emacs, lotr, star wars, games, natalie portman... you get the idea.

      I don't see anyone saying "This is good news! Time for us to capitalise on the bad situation and get more Linux into businesses!" but even if someone did, that would be just one dude...

      I'm a little tired of these "Isn't it funny how everyone on Slashdot is biased?" posts. They seem to come up for *every* MS story, irrespective of what the other posts actually say.

      Cheers
      Stor
  • The remaining Windows machine here runs Windows 2000. Works fine, far less hassle than XP. XP is always calling home to Microsoft for something or other.

    Everything else runs QNX or Linux. The QNX machines are solid; the Linux machine seems to need attention about once a month.

  • Obligatory MS bash (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kozar_The_Malignant ( 738483 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:08PM (#9784560)

    >3 out of 5 of the machines failed to come back up, and had to have both SP1 and SP2 removed via various hacks supplied by Microsoft.

    Sounds like this puppy's ready to go gold.
  • Micrsoft sees the worm attacks taking down systems and decided to do something about it, and thus XP SP2 was born.

    Worms took down 60% of the systems they got installed on, and now too, so does XP SP2.

    Protect yourself from the next round of worms due out in a few weeks, and install XP SP2 to take down your system before a Worm does. If your system is offline, it cannot be infected by a worm, you are protected 100%!

    Microsoft also competes with spyware/adware companies by making XP SP2 hard to uninstall as well without some clever hacks, or the uninstall program from the creator of the software.

    "We're just looking out for your best interests." an anonymous Microsoft employee is quoted as saying.

    "Warning, slippery when sarcastic!"
  • So, the news is that they have a 2 out of 5 average improvement? C'mon, let's give them a hand, don't chastise them for their success!

  • Expee esspeetoo (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sunspire ( 784352 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:17PM (#9784639)
    I'm sure Windows XP SP2 is going to fix every known security problem, block pop-ups and make your cows give 10% more milk. But what about us non-XP customers? To this day at my company we're putting Windows 2000 on all new computers, and we're not about to change to XP anyime soon, looks more like never in fact (except for new laptops where it makes sense).

    Last time I checked W2K was still on the list of fully supported operating systems for at several years. In fact, I've got black on white that we're promised security fixes at least up till 2007. Up until now W2K and XP have recieved new patches in sync, is this about to change? As they say, Microsofts worst competitor is their own older products, maybe this is a new way of "encouraging" upgrading.

    • Re:Expee esspeetoo (Score:4, Informative)

      by dabraun ( 626287 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:26PM (#9784728)
      Microsoft releases all of the actual security patches for Win2K as well ... XPSP2 is not just a set of security patches though. Odds are that every *known* vulnerability that is fixed in XPSP2 has already had it's fix released publicly for both XP and Win2K.

      SP2 also includes tons of fixes for 'possible' vulnerabilities (things like 'ok, here's a potential buffer overrun - can't find a specific path for an outsider to get in and exploit it but we're going to fix it anyway.)

      Most importantly SP2 includes 'security features' within the OS - like new auto update functionality (pushing it to be on by default, nagging you repeatedly if you apply an update that requires a reboot and opt to reboot later), a way better firewall including firewall protection from the moment the system comes on to the net at boot time (previously there was a short window where the firewall wasn't on), popup blocking but more importantly a very strong effort to help users NOT install activex controls unless they really want them (you have to see it to understand what I mean ...) - lots of measures there surrounding avoiding spyware.

      These are all product features, not security patches - you really can't expect to get them in Win2K - they just aren't part of the product. That's not to say that some of these things might not get ported anyway - but you can't really complain if they don't ... as long as you get the actual patches for vulnerabilities.
  • My pc was't working (ie and firefox crashed 3 sec affter asssesing a page. out of town and in troubble i booted to my linux partition downloaded SP2 beta and installed it and it fixed it...

  • Trojans/worms now know how to uninstall SP1 (Score:5, Informative)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:36PM (#9784807) Homepage Journal
    Very interesting how (relatively) easy it is to uninstall all service packs from Win XP:

    * Execute whatever DOS commands are in spuninst.txt
    * Set a registry key to "LocalSystem"
    * Execute spuninst\spuninst.exe
    * Reboot to restore (most) drivers

    Once this is done, the article says, all service packs are gone without a trace. This leaves the Win XP box in the state it would have been in on October 14, 2003, with all these vulnerabilities [microsoft.com].

    So much for security patches!

    • Uninstalling critical updates can also be easy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jesterzog ( 189797 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @08:28PM (#9785649) Journal

      Very interesting how (relatively) easy it is to uninstall all service packs from Win XP:

      I was recently helping a friend to clean out her XP Home computer. Since she'd bought it no patches of any sort had been applied, and it was at the horrendous state where if she left it alone for a few hours, she'd come back to see a desktop popping full of porn advertisements.

      I downloaded all of the available critical updates from Windows Update and showed her how to run AdAware, which on its own detected and removed something near a thousand suspicious objects. We then took a look around places like the add/remove software section.

      At this point she got quite a shock because about half the listed programs were something called "HotFix". After everything that'd been frustrating her in the past months, she wanted to remove them all immediately. When you've spent the last hour removing porno popup and spyware programs from your computer, something called a "hotfix" does not look like it's supposed to be there. It took a lot of effort to convince her that a Hotfix is actually a Microsoft patch.

      It hadn't occurred to me until then that it's not a particularly intelligent name for what's supposed to be a security patch. Now I start to wonder how many other people out there go ahead and remove the hot fixes because they don't realise that they're not spyware. It'd be very much in Microsoft's interests to consider renaming their critical updates.

      • what a great point. just underlines how much of a devide there really still is between makers and users. Now you mention it, i wonder what the h*ll those hotfixes (some of which begin "Windows XP hotfix" and others that don't) are doing in amoungst all the users' apps? surely OS components should have their own list or be hidden by a checkbox or something to mark them out as being different, important and basically not be there when a user is looking to make some more hard disk space or whatever..

  • SP2 Breaks BestCrypt (Score:5, Informative)

    by karmatic ( 776420 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @06:37PM (#9784820)
    I use bestcrypt (kind of like a crypto loopback device, only for windows), and SP2 hosed it. The device driver won't load, and I still can't access any of my encrypted data.

    I wonder what SP2 did that broke it?

  • Redirect to /dev/null (Score:5, Informative)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @07:23PM (#9785153) Homepage
    The parent article is just plain ridiculous. I'm the I.T. Director for a large organization, and practically the entire I.T. department is running SP2 RC2, busily finding out what it breaks (not as much as you'd think, actually). The idea that 3 out of 5 machines "didn't come back up" is either due to (a) really funky, odd hardware or (b) a really screwy WinXP core install. We've had a 100% upgrade success rate and no reason to complain thus far, and we've got way more than 5 systems done.

    But it wouldn't matter if we had 100 systems that worked right because it's a statistically insignificant sample of the overall whole. Hey, I had a Linux box not come back up once because I updated the kernel 2.4 kernel package with a 2.5 development release package! I guess the 2.6 kernel needed to go back to testing big time, eh? Do you see the idiocy of the parent article's claim and further assumption?

    But then again this is Slashdot, where no good bashing of Microsoft goes unheralded.

    • Re:Redirect to /dev/null (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _marshall ( 71584 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @09:02PM (#9785917) Homepage
      It's not that I disagree completely with your statement about slashdot being biased against microsoft, and I definately agree with your assesment of the article, but....

      It seems that in the past year or two I've heard people whining about all the anti-MS FUD that happens on slashdot. Whenever someone (like yourself) has a good rebuttal to the parent story, it gets modded up for everyone to see, and everyone sees their complaint.

      Now, I _might_ be wrong on this, but the fact that posts like yours -- that are exposing the truth behind articles like these -- are being seen more and more lately in the higher thresholds, is evidence to me that the community is willing to hear your "pro-MS" rebuttal, and therefore is not quite as closed minded as the generalization makes it out to be.

      [Insert obligatory.. "This is Pro-MS, therefore no one will like me and i'll be modded as flamebait" comment here =P]

  • SP2-RC1 Killed my PC (Score:3, Informative)

    by mh101 ( 620659 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @08:07PM (#9785445)
    There's lots of posts here about how they've have no problems with SP2... Well, I tried installing SP2-RC1 shortly after it became available, and it totally hosed that PC.

    I couldn't even finish booting. XP Setup's recovery option couldn't even run. I had to reinstall XP from scratch, into a new folder, just to boot up. Couldn't install it into the same folder either (I didn't just pop in a bootdisk and delete C:\Windows because I wanted to save some of the files - too much to do via command prompt).

    I then vowed that I wouldn't install SP2 until the final version had been out for a while, and nobody was reporting any problems.

  • Security concerns aside (Score:3, Insightful)

    by earthforce_1 ( 454968 ) <earthforce_1@y[ ]o.com ['aho' in gap]> on Friday July 23, 2004 @08:15PM (#9785531) Journal
    I think I am going to wait a few weeks before putting SP2 on my XP machines. Let somebody else be the guinea pig, and I will wait for the fixes. Until then, I will just avoid IE, don't click on attachments, and trust in my (Linux) firewall to keep everything else out.

  • I've been out. (Score:3, Funny)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @08:33PM (#9785696) Journal
    Is there anyone who hasn't posted a joke along the lines of "Windows 3.1 still rough around the edges?"

  • No problems here. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Maul ( 83993 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @09:36PM (#9786116) Journal
    I'm running SP2 RC2 on my machine here and it is going suprisingly well. I've only had problems with one application (which I was able to resolve by uninstalling and reinstalling it).

  • 4 for 4 successes for me (Score:5, Informative)

    by cookd ( 72933 ) <.moc.onuj. .ta. .koocsalguod.> on Friday July 23, 2004 @09:45PM (#9786164) Journal
    I work at Microsoft. They asked us to upgrade our SP1 machines to the latest build of SP2. I started with a test box (for which I have Ghost images), and that went quite well. I moved on to two other boxes that I use for parallel builds (no Ghost images, but nothing lost if they die), and they came back up just great. At that point I was confident enough to upgrade my main system. Again, no trouble. All of my updates were done via the "Windows Update" web site.

    While the first 3 machines were VERY clean machines (essentially XP + patches + antivirus, no other software installed and no major configuration changes), the 4th machine was my work machine -- I've probably installed or uninstalled something from my box every day for the past year (but I'm still on the original install of Windows). While I know how to keep the machine operating well, it definitely isn't a clean box.

    As with any upgrade or patch, there are risks. But I had absolutely no trouble with the upgrade on any of the 4 machines. The only difference is that the firewall pops up a message box every once in a while asking if I want to allow a connection. Oh, the "Settings and Preferences" link from the Antitrust settlement was "restored" (how many times do I have to delete that thing?).

    Nothing is ever perfect, especially with software. But Microsoft has tried very hard to make sure this will work well for everybody. And as far as I can tell, they've done a good job. Yes, there will be some bugs. Yes, you'll want to be careful about applying this to production machines (make backups!). But I think the majority of people will upgrade and have no trouble.

  • "winserv" = Sypware? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Utopia ( 149375 ) on Friday July 23, 2004 @10:36PM (#9786436)
    A message stated that "winserv" was missing.

    winserv is not application which would be needed at boot time.
    It looks like a spyware to me.

    http://www.spyany.com/program/article_spy_rm_IEPlu gin.html [spyany.com] seems to confirm my suspisions.

    Obiviuosly SP2 RC2 didn't hose the machine. It was a spyware

  • Biting off more than they, or anyone, can chew (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scupper ( 687418 ) * on Saturday July 24, 2004 @08:44AM (#9788348) Homepage
    Nothing new from this cube, just wondering why Microsoft is once again biting off more than it can chew with trying to tackle so many upgrades and patches with XP SP2.

    It seems unnecessary to have to make one gargantuan service pack, instead of releasing smaller service packs semi-annually, some being small, some being large depending on the demands/vulnerabilities discovered during the 6 month cycle.

    They could also focus on enterprise service packs and desktop service packs separately.

    Ther just doesn't seem to be any middle ground; there's linux distros and their apps which weekly release patches/upgrades, and then there's Microbloat at the opposite end of the spectrum.

    Like I said, nothing new from this cube that hasn't been laid out here before, just seems like common sense isn't being applied at Redmond, and it doesn't make sense, because common sense is open source, free!

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