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First rule of phone troubleshooting: It's something stupid. Second rule: The customer is lying.Aaron_ATX said:Kinda reminds me of when my friends wife called me with a computer problem. Seems that anytime she tried to type something she'd get tons of "-" signs on the page. After 15 minutes or so on the phone with her, I went over to find out that she had a book laying across the friggin numberpad on the keyboard.
::shivers:: it really irritates me when people blanket someone with "install SP2 and all your troubles will go away" While I grant that SP2 went a long way to fixing security holes for most users, it really did nothing that one cannot do on one's own by turning off services, closing ports, and keeping Anti-viral and Spyware signatures up to date.Phoenix86 said:Also, install SP2.
But when this problem is most likely due to one certain virus, that exploited a security hole, that SP2 fixed, it becomes rather good advice...right? Yes. SP2 isn't optional anymore. Before I'd give some snappy comeback about SP2, I'd fixed the errors in your post. First example, your ranting paragraph about memory usage.svet-am said:::shivers:: it really irritates me when people blanket someone with "install SP2 and all your troubles will go away" While I grant that SP2 went a long way to fixing security holes for most users, it really did nothing that one cannot do on one's own by turning off services, closing ports, and keeping Anti-viral and Spyware signatures up to date.
Additionally, on my boxes, SP2 broke a fair amount of apps. Some were games (FIFA 2004, Microsoft Baseball 2000,etc.), some were apps (WordPerfect 2002 Suite and Cadence OrCAD suite 9,etc).
finally, the "firewall" and such that's included in SP2 is a horrible memory hog. Even if my games *ran* under SP2, they'd probably run like crap because of the memory footprint. While this isn't a big deal on my beefy FX-53 box with 2GB of RAM, it *is* an issue on my Thinkpad T21 that only has 512MB of RAM and a PIII-1GHz.
Personally, around here, we run patched-up SP1 boxes with a router (that's doing firewall port filtering) and an old linux box running the linux firewall project.
You're actually wrong about one of your points. SP2 isn't optional if you have Automatic Updates turned on and enabled. However, that's one of the first things I disable on my boxes. And, I can still get to WindowsUpdate.Microsoft.com just fine and just tell it to do a 'custom update' and then select the updates sans SP2. Microsoft has actually been pretty consistent about stating that they were not going to force SP2 on their corporate (ie, managed by a competent IT staff) customers. That's why it's only non-optional for Automatic Updates, not WindowsUpdate.djnes said:But when this problem is most likely due to one certain virus, that exploited a security hole, that SP2 fixed, it becomes rather good advice...right? Yes. SP2 isn't optional anymore. Before I'd give some snappy comeback about SP2, I'd fixed the errors in your post. First example, your ranting paragraph about memory usage.
It's not forced to Corporate IT infrastructures, so that they corporate security folks can make the necessary customizations. We, for example, push it out with the firewall disabled, since we use hardware firewalls. As for it being mandatory....it absolutely is. It's just not forced out, so that it can be rolled out with the correct settings. As you stated Microsoft has been consistent....in making sure everyone has SP2, and making sure they are readily available to assist Enterprise Security folks in getting it out to their install base.svet-am said:You're actually wrong about one of your points. SP2 isn't optional if you have Automatic Updates turned on and enabled. However, that's one of the first things I disable on my boxes. And, I can still get to WindowsUpdate.Microsoft.com just fine and just tell it to do a 'custom update' and then select the updates sans SP2. Microsoft has actually been pretty consistent about stating that they were not going to force SP2 on their corporate (ie, managed by a competent IT staff) customers. That's why it's only non-optional for Automatic Updates, not WindowsUpdate.
As to the memory usage point, I just Googled and can't find the site that I was going to link to where the statistics are, so I'll yield to you on that one for now. If I have the time this afternoon, I may take one of my spare boxes around here and put XPSP2 on it and run some of my own comparisons and post them.
You should have waited to post this unil AFTER the OP says it's not Sasser. Either way I'm not getting into another SP2 discussion. If you dont want to patch your PC, fine, but don't lambast someone else for recommending it...svet-am said:::shivers:: it really irritates me when people blanket someone with "install SP2 and all your troubles will go away" While I grant that SP2 went a long way to fixing security holes for most users, it really did nothing that one cannot do on one's own by turning off services, closing ports, and keeping Anti-viral and Spyware signatures up to date.
Additionally, on my boxes, SP2 broke a fair amount of apps. Some were games (FIFA 2004, Microsoft Baseball 2000,etc.), some were apps (WordPerfect 2002 Suite and Cadence OrCAD suite 9,etc).
finally, the "firewall" and such that's included in SP2 is a horrible memory hog. Even if my games *ran* under SP2, they'd probably run like crap because of the memory footprint. While this isn't a big deal on my beefy FX-53 box with 2GB of RAM, it *is* an issue on my Thinkpad T21 that only has 512MB of RAM and a PIII-1GHz.
Personally, around here, we run patched-up SP1 boxes with a router (that's doing firewall port filtering) and an old linux box running the linux firewall project.