RSS106 Million XP SP2 Downloads Tallied
By David Worthington | Published October 20, 2004, 6:27 PM
The tally is in: Just two months after Windows XP Service Pack 2 was publicly distributed, users worldwide have downloaded in excess of 106 million copies of the update. According to Microsoft, approximately 90 million copies were downloaded via Automatic update, Windows Update and Microsoft's Download Center; another 16 million copies were distributed on compact discs.
Windows XP SP2 is an operating system update deemed critical by Microsoft because it was designed with a single goal in mind: Security. The second service pack fortifies Windows XP with stronger default security settings; a new version of Internet Explorer that includes a pop-up blocker and a retooled download manager; automatic updating; memory protection against buffer overruns; e-mail safeguards for Outlook Express; Windows Firewall; and new security settings for Windows Media Player 9.
According to Microsoft, the 106 million distributions mainly encompasses consumers and small business customers. A company spokesperson could not quantify the number of enterprises that have deployed the update, but claimed that customers were reporting "good results."
Due to the sweeping changes that it introduces to Windows, many network administrators have forestalled the installation of SP2, which is a truly massive update in comparison to past service packs. That said, Microsoft responded to customer feedback and their fears of disruption, providing network administrators with additional time to validate their installations.
Microsoft support has issued a tool that temporarily blocks the delivery of SP2 through automatic updating. The tool will cease to operate on April 12, 2005. In addition, a list of SP2 incompatibilities was issued to help smooth the transition.
After installing XP2, on some occasions, usually after several hours, explorer will begin to spike the CPU useage to 100% each 3-4 seconds. I have stopped every other running program not critical, to no avail. I have uninstalled this product and hope I can find out what the problem is before I have to install it again.
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I'm also getting spikes in CPU usage on one of my notebook computers. The other computers seem to be OK.
I traced part of the problem to TeaTimer.exe running in Spybot Search & Destroy, and when I turned that function off, things greatly improved. But I still get unpredictable memory leakage of some kind on that computer.
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i had this problem with the teatimer too, but that was not a sp2 problem. In fact I had this problem on windows 2000 too.
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that said that 1 in 3 XPSP2 installs would trash A PC, then there are now over 30 million broken PC's
What is more likely, is that they wanted a cheap story, tested XPSP2 on 3 PC's and 1 of them screwed up!!! Reality is, it's 1 in 1000 (or more) PC's won't like XPSP2, but I doubt the gutter press sites lite TheRegister or TheInquirer will post corrected stories..
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I can successfully say that I've received an SP2 update disk. Will Microsoft be selling WinXP installation disk with SP2 a part of the installer? It would be good for OEMs.
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Don't know where you fellas lives, but they are selling full retail copies of Windows XP Professional with SP-2 already integrated here in the Dallas, Texas area at any computer chain stores now. That's good to see.
Also, since I do tech support for various OEM hardware companies, I am seeing around 1-1000 installs go bad, roughly. Usually do to the thrid party vendors mostly from those that have problems with SP-2 security settings being elevated. The PCs that are completely trashed all the way are around 1-10000, I am guessing.
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It's to be expected that users are having problems running SP2 with their old software. I guess SP2 isn't backwards compatible with old programs that would normally have access to areas deemed restricted on SP2. Time for some software updates.
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