CW said:
In the interests of security, I feel I should install SP2. But I have a
nice
stable system at present (XP Pro SP1, MM2.0) and all I seem to see on here
with reference to SP2 is horror stories of problems with MM (2.1)
following
the upgrade.
Does anybody have a good word to say about it? Anybody outside MS, that
is...
Views, please?
Most people don't have major problems. And those that don't tend not to
saying anything.
Some people do. Major problems. And these are the only people who comment.
Some people have minor problems. It mostly goes okay but some few things
are a bit borked. (I fall into that category.)
Treat it like you would an actual upgrade. Like you'd do if you went from
Win98 to XP. Don't treat it like you are just applying a minor patch or
update.
Do a backup. Make sure you have the latest drivers installed. Disable your
virus scanner, firewall, etc. etc. Anything that hooks into the OS.
Realistically, for the end user who has kept up with the patches, the only
real benefit to installing it is now Outlook Express can do plain text
reading of messages, and the pop-up blocker in IE.
Most of the other supposedly beneficial stuff has no real benefit. Plus it
interferes with many p2p programs. And until just recently, when they
released a patch, it screwed up a lot of net proxy stuff that used other
than 127.0.0.1 And the firewall, while improved, is still practically
worthless since it doesn't do outbound protection.
Not really enough in there for it to be a mandatory upgrade.
But since Microsoft has made it mandatory, you're going to have to do it
eventually. Better on your terms when you have the time to spend repairing
it if something does go wrong, than on Microsoft's schedule and your system
going bonkers a few hours before you need to use it for something important.
