XP SP3 Crashes Some AMD Machines 267
Stony Stevenson alerts us to new information on the XP SP3-induced crashes that we discussed a few days back. Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft, is maintaining an ongoing log and support site for users affected by any of several problems triggered by XP3. Machines using AMD hardware, particularly HP desktops, seem to have several modes of failure; others affect Intel machines.
Typical Microsoft (Score:4, Funny)
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Sound of thousands of rebooting PCs, etc etc.
Re:Typical Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Typical Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Typical Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft knowingly released unfinished software? (Score:5, Informative)
I've experienced that, many times. Windows is unstable. The instability helps Microsoft sell new versions of its operating system.
Summary of the Slashdot article about Windows XP SP3 crashes:
Microsoft has known about one of the underlying problems for a long time. See KB888372 [microsoft.com]. It would have been easy to prevent the crashes merely by having SP3 installation do the work mentioned in the KB888372 article. However, apparently because of work avoidance, or an attempt to discourage people from using Windows XP, Microsoft did not do the necessary work.
Re:Microsoft knowingly released unfinished softwar (Score:3, Interesting)
That would be fine if the newer versions were stabler. My experience with Vista has left me longing for XP.
Maybe SP3 re-activated an old problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
Read the article referenced in the Slashdot story. Also, the Microsoft KB article says:
"APPLIES TO
Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (SP2)
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, when used with:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Home Edition".
The story referenced by the Slashdot story rings true to me. The kind of sloppiness in programming we see fro
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Great. Another Winshill who can't understand that they are not the whole world.
Ulterior motive (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ulterior motive (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Ulterior motive (Score:4, Insightful)
There is only one problem with this theory (Score:5, Insightful)
That might just be bad business decisions on their part, but whether it was malicious or stupidity does not matter. In either case the end result is that MS loses more customers. Nobody wanted to hear that MS was losing or soon to be dead a year ago when predictions were rife, but here it is, in your face. MS is consistently failing to either impress or produce quality product. The dragon^H^H^H^H^Hcathedral is near death... is it time for the penny market to celebrate?
Not on your life, it will be time to celebrate when the dried bones of the dragon are used up as party favors. Until then, it is time to keep competing aggressively, and nothing short of that will do. Competition, not patents, drives innovation. Innovation will bring us secure computing at home. A kind of secure that behaves friendly to the end user.
Now, am I bashing MS for pleasure? No, it is because MS products are in their deathbed and nothing short of a complete restart will get them out of it. It does not appear that MS will do that. There is nothing in current or near future activity that shows MS will do anything different from what got them in the death bed to start with. The beast is dieing. There is nothing more to say.
Call that a troll if you will, but the truth hurts sometimes. Do I want it to die? NO! Emphatically NO!!!! Without competition, quality dies. Would I like to see MS slide into a comfortable second place? Yes.... and the reasons are simple, just ask any Linux fanboi for them.
SP3 failed utterly in the face of the current market that MS faces. There is NO excuse for that in business. If you believe the art of war extends to business, MS deserves to be beheaded ungracefully. That is how business goes, so don't bother telling me that I'm a troll.
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No, it is because MS products are in their deathbed and nothing short of a complete restart will get them out of it.
SP3 has worked fine here.. Hardly noticed a difference (the security policy explanations were nice though), and XP has been great in general.
/. stor
If they were writing for a limited set of machines I'm sure XP and Vista wouldn't face these hardware specific problems, but they're writing for use by as many people as possible, with as few problems as possible, and pushing it out at a competitive price.
That is how the marketplace is supposed to work, and it looks like it's working fine for MS (fanatic
Re:There is only one problem with this theory (Score:4, Insightful)
It was not JUST tablet users. Read some news would you! IE8 beta users were screwed too. MS has had decades at working with EVERY kind of hardware. It's fscking lame to call that bluff now. F/OSS software might be able to still do that, but MS has NO excuse. period. for any reason. They have been working with this hardware FOR_EVER! I don't know how to say that strongly enough. Fuck! The hardware has been designed around the GD software. There is NO excuse. Business is business. Get it right or fail... this look like one more fail in the bag of fail that MS is filling up fairly fast. From a pure business pundit prospective, MS failed here. Keep drinking the coolaid!
Re:There is only one problem with this theory (Score:4, Insightful)
Hopefully none. A smart business knows better than to run beta software for their mission-critical tasks.
A smart business would also know never to upgrade their systems the very moment an upgrade to a piece of software comes out. It's much smarter to wait a few weeks for the developers to figure out the problems that slipped by unnoticed during the beta stages due to fewer users. This is true for both free software and proprietary software. I remember having some nasty problems when I upgraded to the last two Ubuntu releases the day they came out. Now I'm waiting for Hardy to "stabilize" because I now know not to run software that's just been released. It's true that what we are talking about is just a service pack, but based on what happened when SP2 came out the public really should have expected Microsoft's future service packs to do just as much under-the-hood tinkering as SP2 did.
Yes, it is partially Microsoft's fault for not warning users on Automatic Updates that SP3 is still brand new and could potentially cause problems, but unless you never had problems with SP2 or were not in charge of a Windows XP machine during that time, this should have been seen from a mile away.
Re:There is only one problem with this theory (Score:4, Interesting)
As a web developer, I routinely install browser betas so that I can catch any problems before they develop. I'm a business and that's called being proactive.
What I also do is run a zoo of Windows / Explorer combos in virtual machines. It's fun to do side by side comparisons. My summary: Vista is much slower at everything.
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"Some Tablet users are complaining about Feisty Fawn! Linux Sux!"
Never mind that there has been TWO RELEASES of Ubuntu since then, with another on the way in six months.
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Re:There is only one problem with this theory (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree with most of what you said, I'm not sure how SP3 "fails utterly". There have been far fewer problems with SP3 than previous service packs. Why, SP2, which is generally regarded as a Very Good Thing (and with good reason) broke a lot more software and machines than SP3 seems to be doing.
I'm usually the first to bash Microsoft when they deserve it, which is 99.9% of the time, but I cannot agree with the assessment that SP3 "fails".
Microsoft in general is "failing utterly" in the current market, but as far as I'm concerned, XP is doing just fine.
There are only two problems with your theory (Score:3, Insightful)
2) You are assuming and intelligent rational buyer's market, when there is only currently a seller's market (ie in the words of my infinitely wise toddler "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit").
The MS Spin machine will, and has already begun to, spin a new myth around SP3 to dazzle and disarm, and t
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Re:Ulterior motive (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, wait a minute! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey, wait a minute! (Score:5, Informative)
Easiest way to fix the problem, before installing SP3, open a CMD window, and type "sc config intelppm start= disabled".
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That won't solve the problem when some obscure motherboard driver or hardware failure sends your system into a tail spin.
I'll take the odds that the most difficult problems to diagnose are with the custom builds. The video card that has worked loose from its slot. The driver that hasn't been updated since August 2001.
Re:Hey, wait a minute! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hey, wait a minute! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Hey, wait a minute! (Score:5, Informative)
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/archive/2008/05/08/does-your-amd-based-computer-boot-after-installing-xp-sp3.aspx [msinfluentials.com]
Johansson (partly) blames HP and other OEMs for using the same disk image for Intel and AMD PCs. He also gives some directions on fixing the problems.
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Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD systm (Score:5, Informative)
The topic you have makes AMD look bad.
Why is HP useing the same basic image for there amd and intel systems?
What other driver bloat is in OEM systems?
Is INTEL coding there drivers to mess up AMD systems?
AMD legal should take a look at this.
I have SP3 running on my AMD right now and it's works 100%
Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy (Score:4, Insightful)
Mac OS X and Linux both do this. Why can't Windows?
Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, this appears to be Microsoft's problem, since HP maintains and is responsible for their own recovery images (all customized for each model and revision of laptop) and their own drivers.
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First, this configuration obviously worked fine for SP2. Second, Microsoft controls the driver certification process, so they should be able to ensure that Intel drivers aren't loading on an AMD system. This is a pretty minor fuckup, but it's firmly in MS's lap.
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Sadly, no. Due to HP's design methodology, the differences between Intel and AMD based systems are vast. Almost none of the hardware is common, minus the video and perhaps the sound. AMD laptops generally use a Broadcom wireless adapter while Intel uses an Intel-branded wireless adapter, for example. Even the SATA controllers use different drivers (different chipsets, after all,) so even more spec
Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Rename the topic to say INTEL drivers on AMD sy (Score:4, Insightful)
What was the point in all the years spent by the PC industry on "Plug & Play", implementing ideas like unique IDs allocated by a manufacturer to their hardware devices and an operating system which can scan these IDs and choose drivers accordingly?
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BAD_POOL_POINTER, HID problem, standyby problem (Score:5, Informative)
Lovely. (Score:2, Informative)
well duh (Score:2)
Wintel Conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
<conspiracy>Maybe Microsoft has a deal with Intel to do the same with SP3 (and other Windows versions/SPs?) or they use Intel's compiler.</conspiracy>
Worth considering.
Re:Wintel Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
make the head line say HP systems useing a unsupported by MS driver setup / image load crash under SP3.
Re:Wintel Conspiracy (Score:5, Informative)
Ancedote time... (Score:5, Funny)
It went reasonably quickly, had exactly one reboot (which brought me fully up to date; no "critical updates" after that), and then ran solidly while I played Portal for another five or six hours.
I was almost disappointed.
It was an Intel machine, though.
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Really: no-one has suggested that all machines have this problem after SP3 is installed, so one anecdote of a machine that does not suffer any problems is pointless.
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Seems now it's not enough just to run Windows, you have to buy an HP as well.
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I got modded "funny" anyway. Cool!
Limited impact (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Limited impact (Score:4, Funny)
Thats what all you fanboy AMD and Intel people deserve.
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I had similar problems with installing silverlight, btw "you are not running a supported
What is the purpose of a service pack? (Score:2, Interesting)
One would think that by SP3 there would only the most minor bugs left to close, but instead giant new ones are opened. Machines that become unbootable? That's pre-alpha quality stuff.
Something is badly broken with their methodology... no wonder they were trying to do a people grab at Yahoo, the higher ups are probably pulling their hair out by now trying to figure out how to fix their organizational problem and maybe
misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
not exactly a cut and dry SP3 problem and certainly not an AMD or INTEL issue at all.
people who write this crap need to all be thrown in a cage and be made to rip each other apart.
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<chant>Two journalists enter. One journalist leaves.</chant>
Actually I'd like to see that as a form of conflict resolution for almost all arguments on slashdot.
endless rebooting is not at all related to SP3 per (Score:3, Funny)
Nope, no relation at all. After all, crashing is perfectly normal.
Im waiting.. (Score:5, Funny)
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OK so far (Score:3, Informative)
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It works fine on my M2N-E-SLI with AMD 64 X2 4300+.
Microsoft: (Score:5, Funny)
The World is our Beta Tester.
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Well of course it is.
There is no standard Windows system.
HP's custom OEM image installed an Intel system file on AMD PCs. Not exactly recommended practice.
Blue screen after first reboot... (Score:5, Informative)
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This bit me today as I manually went though Windows Update on one of my office's machines, an older Compaq Presario with an AMD processor. Not knowing about the simple 1 line of instructions that would
Compared to Vista SP1... (Score:3, Interesting)
address bar is removed though (Score:2)
There are work arounds and third party patches - but this is just annoying.
HP SP2 problems too (Score:3, Informative)
Stop code 0x0000007E is not a new problem (Score:5, Informative)
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Screen rotation (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Bullshit! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Frist Pr0st (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Frist Pr0st (Score:4, Funny)
Uhh, hello? Anybody still there?
Re:Frist Pr0st (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only one crash (Score:4, Funny)
Wow! Your anecdote (in which you don't even mention if you're using intel or AMD) has totally changed my mind about the reliability of SP3!
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Re:Only one crash (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only one crash (Score:5, Funny)
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