Microsoft is finally releasing Service Pack 2 into the wild via its Windows Update platform. Those of us in the know, however, have had SP2 for quite a while.
If you’re a home user, I strongly recommend applying SP2. I’ve put it through testing on my machines and have not encountered any problems with it… and that’s a big thing for me to say, considering I was personally very skeptical, and worried that advanced users would feel as if training wheels were being forced upon them through this upgrade. To date, Sp2 has been running on all of my machines for a week now (including this server), with no adverse effects, and I dare say that any programs that do fail to run correctly under Service Pack 2 were probably very sloppily-coded to being with. To be frank, it’s about time that stricter coding guidelines were enforced.
Otherwise, there are a few new warning messages and popups here and there, but nothing too limiting.
My recommendations on Service Pack 2:
– Download it and install it as soon as you can. The IE popup blocker (if you feel the need to use Internet Explorer), built in firewall and all the security fixes are certainly worth it.
Ultimately, if you have serious problems, Service Pack 2 does allow for a rollback to SP1 if necessary.
– Microsoft strongly recommends waiting for SP2 to download automatically using their automatic updates feature. Personally I find this problematic because a lot of people will be downloading SP2 all at once initially, causing a huge demand for bandwidth (and possible slowdown) at Microsoft’s update servers, and you won’t be able to track the progress of this download. Also, if you have more than one computer, each workstation will be downloading their own separate copy of SP2, compounding that whole demand-versus-bandwidth problem. And most importantly: if you’re a college student coming back to campus, many colleges and universities are freaking out at the possibility of thousands of students all trying to download the patch all at once, bringing campus networks to a crawl. To “compensate,” universities have chosen to block downlods of SP2 through Windows Update and through Automatic Updates… clearly it seems they’ve panicked to the point that they’d rather deal with compromised computers DDoSing away on their network instead of reaping a long-term clearing of their networks by letting people install the service pack.
What Microsoft strongly discourages is having people download the IT professional edition of Service Pack 2 and burning it to a CD for storage and later retrieval. I have to disagree. Having the complete SP2 on CD is a huge advantage and benefit to end users as well as Microsoft. This way you’ll only need to download it once, can readily pull it out along with your Windows XP install CD if a major crash ever requires you to to start again from scratch, and it ensures that you have SP2 ready to install on a computer that doesn’t have it yet even if you have no available net connection, or one that is too slow to download the pack in a reasonable amount of time.
This is of course just my opinion, and presumably Microsoft has their reasons for wanting everyone to wait for the automatic rollout despite all the drawbacks. But, I don’t think it makes sense to wait, when a perfectly good, complete, CD-burnable version of the update is already available.