XP SP2 Adoption Lagging Overseas 234
Vizquel wrote to mention an eWeek article reporting that Microsoft is frustrated with the lack of Service Pack 2 usage overseas. From the article: "During a keynote at the Security Summit East here, McKee said Microsoft has so far distributed more than 250 million copies of XP SP2 to provide a hardened shell around the operating system but the low upgrade levels remains a disappointment."
Re:Why bother? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I'm no expert.... (Score:5, Interesting)
In August another machine with a factory XP install which had gotten SP2 died mysteriously overnight after accepting yet another automatic Windows update. A random windows corruption happens, but doubt was thrown when one of the WIn2k machines lost windows the next week so I turned off all automated updating from Microsoft. I didn't like them auto-rebooting anyway.
Both these machines' drives scanned clean in postmortem, they run behind a hardware firewall, and we also run zonealarm and F-Prot AV. They all have IE but it's rarely used and it's encased in the popupcop wrapper anyway. All software is paid for, the products are all together in case of a BSA visit. I'm done with updating, these things run beautifully as long as MS doesn't fuck with them. Frankly, Windows Genuine Advantage and Microsoft XP Product Activation gives me the willies. WTF do they harass paying customers while the pirates get away with their custom disks w/ no activation. XP SP2 sucks, beyond the gross Fisher-Price interface, there are certain problems, expecially pertaining to deleting files from flash cards that XP suffers from, that make it unusable in my business.
Re:SP2 got bad rep (Score:3, Interesting)
- New.net or some other spyware crashing and burning when you install SP2
- Obsolete firewall/antivirus software crashing, burning and exploding in a shower of small bits when you install SP2
Or, alternatively, Dell installs some truly odd crap to their systems as standard software.
Two reasons: 1. YOU suck, 2. Your users don't. (Score:3, Interesting)
People only upgrade when the benefits outweigh the cost. They don't trust Microsoft. They've been lied to again and again and it hurts them.
Security has always been a joke to Microsoft and people are tired of getting sucked in to an upgrade treadmill.
Corporations HATE change. CMicrosoft keeps hange hits them in the pocketbook. My client was using NT 4.x until it got EOLed by Microsoft. They switched to Win2K, not XP, but Win2K, because the bugs had been kicked out of it.
They don't want or need all the gimracks and geegaws. They want an OS to just do what its told, just like they want employees to just do as they're told.
Microsoft can stand on its head and spit nickels and it won't salve the wounds of their users (IE is a disaster, VB is a shame, and the whole OS is ramshackle,) or make it cheaper to run.
What? You think that corporations LIKE paying millions for a series of security risks? One after another?
Its a wonder you get any upgraders at all.
Re:Possible reason (Score:1, Interesting)
Before SP2, everything worked. After SP2 program doesn't send/receive messages to network properly. After reading documentation I found out that it is propably because of SP2 new fine security protocols.
After trying to fix something that was broken by a security update for several hours (without first knowing it was the security update that broke it) all I can say to your "ignorance" and "privacy", is something I can't print here.