Windows XP Service Pack 2: Install With Care

CRN ^ | Jul. 23, 2004 | Frank J. Ohlhorst and Vincent A. Randazzese

[COEXERJ145]

I downloaded the full version from the "IT Professionals" part of Microsoft's website. Took forever to install but haven't had a problem with it on my home computer or any PC at work. (Actually amazed about the work PC's as everything seems to cause their Novell software to self destruct.)

[LTCJ]

As my post stated, the article was about a beta release. I had a similar experience with the offical SP2 release.

[Remington Rebel]

I have been using Sp2 now for about 3 days or so.. NO problems AT ALL! I slipstreamed it onto my winxp pro disk formated then did a fresh install. 0 problems!

[NotQuiteCricket]

from windowsupdate.microsoft.com?

Or from the download (the huge friggin file that won't fit on my 256Meg Key drive) for network administrators?

Just curious. Because I heard that MS was waiting for a couple of weeks to put it on windowsupdate, and I can't help but feel that they are doing that to catch most of the "features" through installation / testing by corporations using their "final" release version. I heard they had bandwidth concerns too (leading to a staggered release), which seemed kinda' odd.

I'm waiting for the CD version myself. Got family on XP with dialup.

[Leroy S. Mort]

I'd check that CD. Some CD players are dodgy with burn-it-yourself CDs. Always burn Operating Systems and upgrades on quality discs at the lowest burn speed. I did my upgrades over a network for just this reason.

[martin_fierro]

Play around with Linux as an alternative OS, without installing it on your hard drive, via a free bootable CD-ROM! Download Knoppix (or one of these other Linux distributions), burn the ISO file onto a CD-ROM, and reboot with the CD-ROM in its drive. If you later want to install Knoppix on your hard drive, here are some tips.

[martin_fierro]

Just Oy.

[The Bandit]

Windows should be called the install, uninstall, install software.

[montag813]

Have they put out anything for Windows Server 2003?

[LTCJ]

Yep - the massive download. Since my daughter will be away at school, I decided to test the SP install on my system (no problem) and then give her a hardened system if that went OK.

I hope everyone's experience mimics my first shot and not my second.

Both installations were done from the same CD.

[chuckles]

I have tried many times to restore from a backup on XP and have failed 100%. I have used backup, Norton Ghost, and Drive Image. I am going to try Nero to make an ISO soon. Does anybody have a foolproof way to get a PC back up after a failure with a backup. I have a dial up and the 40 odd updates take 2 days to download after instaling SP1a, not counting the Norton System works downloads, not counting all the serial number entries on the little chicken $h&t programs I have, not counting all the settings I change to get the right wallpapers, fonts and file attributes I like, and setting the 3 monitors settings. Yes, I tried the settings import feature, got about 50% right. I put my e-mail on another drive folder and my MetaStock data folder on another drive and any other thing I don't want to loose like my documents. XP, of course, has its own place it wants to put all these things. From viruses to blown motherboards and just bad luck, I have had to format C: probably 10 times this year, and it's only August. I would love to have one of those restoral disks to pop in and be up in an hour. I am downloading SP2 as I type, so in about a week of downloading, I will be, of course, doing it again. I'm a geek and can't help myself.

If I could only learn Linux!!! If I could only learn anything,......just anything, at my age.

[Leroy S. Mort]

Both installations were done from the same CD.

I've got a Plextor drive that will read almost anything, but I've also got a LiteOn that will occasionally fail to read correctly discs that the Plextor handles just fine. My point was that your daughter's drive may have hiccuped during the install.

[LTCJ]

Windows Server 2003

Wouldn't know. Sorry.

[LTCJ]

Could be; it was burned on a LiteOn under Linux, read on another LiteOn under XP, and then seemed to read OK with no error messages on whatever the Dell uses only to fail on reboot.

[Leroy S. Mort]

Have they put out anything for Windows Server 2003?

Windows Server 2003 service pack delayed until 2005

[Ichneumon]

I'll just wait for IE7 to get tabbed windows.

Go to http://www.avantbrowser.com/ and get tabbed windows in IE6 *now*.

Avant bills itself as a new browser, but it's actually just a fantastic UI modification to IE. It adds tabbed windows, and much, much more. Of all the people I've shown it to, 100% have become converts.

[Texas_Jarhead]

BUMPMARK for later

[BibChr]

Thanks; I've turned off automatic update. I seldom if ever have experienced the MS disasters often gleefully reported... and I don't want to start!

Dan

[weatherFrEaK]

All computers updated here with full SP2 install and all is fine. Each SP2 upgrade took about 25 minutes to complete, BTW, on fast PCs no more than 6 months old.

[TechJunkYard]

There is a page of user experiences and some workarounds with SP2 posted at the SANS Internet Storm Center web site.

With the huge variety of hardware in use, and the assortment of software that breaks for some and doesn't break for others, it appears that SP2 never goes on the same way twice.