What's the status of XP SP2?

[LiamC]

Is it safe to install, no major gotcha's?

I guess I'm getting a little gun shy in my old age. :eekers:

Software "upgrades" have burnt me too many times...

 

[blakerwry]

havent had any problems myself. I've been told not to install it at work because some old software we use isn't compatible.

 

[Handruin]

Like blake, I've installed SP2 with no problems. I've heard others don't have the same success story. I'd give it a 90% chance of survival for you. Sit back, have a been and let SP2 chug away. :tgif:

 

[LunarMist]

SP2 was OK on the desktop PC, but messed up my notebook. It won't connect to the internet or burn/verify DVDs without errors, and it took forever to shut down. Screw it I say, so back to SP1...

 

[mubs]

One 3-year old desktop (that I custom built for somebody) and two recent-vintage HP notebooks are working fine after I installed SP2 on them.

One new vomit desktop (CompCrap) is in the shithouse, with spontaneous reboots, constant IE/Firefox crashes, Word 2003 crashes etc. I don't know if it's because of SP2, .Net (installed forcibly along with DriveImage 7), or the heap of crap sw that comes preloaded. The box is coming back to me for "fixing". Where are the gonads on a CompCrap located, again?

 

[LiamC]

Vomit box.

May I suggest running over it with a M1Ax/Challenger 2/Leopard2/T-90 MBT?

 

[Buck]

One 3-year old desktop (that I custom built for somebody) and two recent-vintage HP notebooks are working fine after I installed SP2 on them.

One new vomit desktop (CompCrap) is in the shithouse, with spontaneous reboots, constant IE/Firefox crashes, Word 2003 crashes etc. I don't know if it's because of SP2, .Net (installed forcibly along with DriveImage 7), or the heap of crap sw that comes preloaded. The box is coming back to me for "fixing". Where are the gonads on a CompCrap located, again?

I had a customer with a similar problem. I uninstalled SP2, the problem persisted, so we ran SpyBot -- problem solved. Reinstalled SP2, no problems.

 

[ddrueding]

Deplyed SP2 at a friends work. 100+ PCs, mostly random cheap-ass beige boxes, some Dells, some HP notebooks, not a single issue.

One of my clients had it and it went on fine, just killed Winfax :roll:

I hate Winfax

 

[Will Rickards]

Fine here on my dell laptop

 

[Howell]

I had big bold errors come at me on my desktop when I upgraded to SP2. Warnings about a corrupt $MFT and such that could not be fixed althought the machine operated normally. I suspect it was something to do with the amount of free drive space located on the drive at upgrade time, 9 gig. Or possibly that I routinely ignore the warnings to reboot after installing software and patches, for days.

Anyway I had to uninstall SP2, reinstall some drivers, move data off the drive and then reinstall SP2. This time it worked fine and I've had no problems.

 

[mubs]

Vomit box.
May I suggest running over it with a M1Ax/Challenger 2/Leopard2/T-90 MBT?

I can't. It's not mine.

I had a customer with a similar problem. I uninstalled SP2, the problem persisted, so we ran SpyBot -- problem solved. Reinstalled SP2, no problems.

This is a brand new m/c, Buck. I installed SpywareBlaster, Spybot, and Ad-Aware SE (the new one), with up-to-date def files, checked everything before I handed it off to the owner. The motherboard is based on an ALI chipset (Athlon 3000+). There may be something wrong with the hardware. I just could not make an image to CDs booting from floppies with DriveImage 2002; after writing one CD it would crap out with an error. I even put my burner in there and that crapped out before finishing the first CD. I wasted ~25 CDs before giving up and making an image from inside WinXP with DI 7.

The rationale for getting this m/c was: 1) The owner is a real cheapass. 2) This m/c was availabe at RatShack for ~$250 after rebates.

Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the rut of providing tech support gratis to family/friends; consumes ~50% of my time (total time, not free time). I'm thinking of moving to Bangor, Maine, to save myself. I don't know anybody there.

 

[Buck]

The motherboard is based on an ALI chipset ...

I haven't trusted one of those since the Socket 7 days.

PS: I hear New Foundland/Labrador is nice if you want to get away from it all. The Avalon region should be nice, you can stay at Signal Hill.

 

[Mercutio]

I've had good experiences and bad experiences with it. The "Bad" mostly have been machines that either are or were heavily infected with parasite spyware badness at some point prior to installing SP 2. I've seen a few PCs with incompatible applications that were important enough to cause rollback.

I still tell people not to install it because Spyware, something that most home users have in quantity, seems to be the #1 reason for it screwing up a machine, but I have incorporated it into my own disk images already.

 

[Bozo]

I do the usual before an upgrade:
Clean out the crap,
run defrag,
run scandisk.
Haven't had any problems on the few boxes I've installed it on.

But! don't be in a hurry as it's a long process.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[EdwardK]

SP2 "knackered" my Tiny Personal Firewall version 2. The latest versions of Tiny is too complicated for me to learn So I reformated and went back to SP1.

Cheers,
Edward

 

[freeborn]

I finally installed it on my gaming and main rigs. At first I thought all was working until I tried to play battlefield 1942 online. This kept crashing to the desktop. After searching the web a bit I found others with the same problem. As it turned out installing the latest Nvidia drivers for my chipset and graphics card solved that problem. All in all I'd say SP2 is worth it with some hidden gotchas. Installing the latest drivers for my hardware solved my problems.

Free

 

[sechs]

Uninstalled it today, and the blue screens are now gone....

 

[Clocker]

SP2 is working great here. I've done the upgrade on a few machines w/o problem. I've also slipstreamed it into some other installations and it worked excellently there too.

C

 

[Tea]

We have been predcatably cautious with it (mind you, we don't run XP on any of our own machines) but no problems to report so far. It does bug us though - Kristi in particular - that the fools have moved things around to differen t places. It's bad enough the way they mindlessly move stuff around between different versions, never mind starting to do it in service packs as well. Why can't they leave things where you expect to find them? It's not as if the new places are any better, just different.

 

[Jimshady]

Just install it.

The biggest thing that shat me was the "security center" that pops-up a balloon EVERY SINGLE TIME you start the system. Then I figured out to make the service a manual one, now it's gold.

 

[GMac]

No problems for me up to press - both my work Toshiba Satellite laptop and home box (Athlon 2100+ 1GB PC2700 DDR etc) have it installed and all the games on the latter work just fine (so does Tiny v5.0, therefore no Windows Firewall related grief). We've not rolled it out on the classroom machines at work yet (that's a major job that'll need doing during the holidays sometime - probably not until next year), but any boxes that come back for repair are getting it, as are office PCs. None have yet keeled over, so we'll keep going.

GM

 

[Jan Kivar]

I'd like to add that apparently a first "critical" update was released yesterday. The kind witch the Automatic Updates picks up. Few findings:

Don't know what settings my friend used, but when he turned of his comp, the shutdown screen (the one with stand by, turn off and restart buttons) had some text added to the bottom part. When he clicked turn off, the computer started to install the update. Where one normally has the "logging off" and "windows is shutting down", was a new screen which said something like "don't power off computer - updates are being installed".

On my comp, I have chosen to manually accept the download and installation. I did start the download yesterday, and apparently it took about 30 hours to download. Or at least that was the difference between starting of the download and Windows notifying about installation possibility. I even managed to put my computer to stand by during the night.

Now, for the irritating part. When I had installed the update, it popped up a window with "restart now/restart later" options. I chose later, as I was still doing something. After ten minutes, and what happens? The same window popped up from the tray. And after that every ten minutes. After three times I had to reboot, I just couldn't stand it popping up every now and then...

Cheers,

Jan

 

[Pradeep]

Recently I've been having probs where every time I right-click a file Windows Explorer crashes. At first I thought a virus, but it turns out it's actually Dr.Divx and SP2 interacting in a sad way. Fortunately an easy fix is at hand. Uninstall the dirty Doc. Or you can fiddle in the reg.

 

[Onomatopoeic]

Recently I've been having probs where every time I right-click a file Windows Explorer crashes...

I'm certain that was fixed a number of weeks ago.

There were similar problems with the Divx when SP-4 for Windows 2000 came out.