I’ve heard it only crashes, and renders completely inoperable, about 50% of the systems on which it is installed. %|
I wish Microsoft would ‘accidently’ wipe all windows code from their disks. They would have to write things from scratch. Then they could get a feel for how hard it is to comply with Microsoft’s arbitrary ‘standards’ 
Microsoft is trying to bring an ancient OS up to date. Yesterday’s computing solutions simply don’t work anymore! The windows Infrastructure needs to be rewritten from scratch in my opinion. This time, Bill Gates had better make security a design goal. You can’t patch a gaping hole with thousands of tiny bandaids :D.
Anyway, just my $0.02
jaycun, that was the smartest anti-Windows post I’ve seen in a while. Good job.
yeah i agree valarking.
jaycun, i think the most annoying thing about windows is the arbitrary coding. not that i am a coder or anything, but everything seems to never run to a set of standards in windows.
like windows attempt to manipulate JAVA and turn it into a microsoft product by making it non-standard LOL.
Alltaken
Those are some other good points alltaken, but not quite as important to MS’s target audience, the user (God, I hate that word).
So far, all the people I’ve asked said that the SP2 worked great and even fixed some minor problems. Hmm.
It apparently also fixes a bug with my router that causes it to drop the connection to the internet for periods of 30 minutes during night.
nope, mostly lies those were
sorta, the people paying with it weren’t very competent [and the systems needed to be rebuilt in my opinion anyway, too much crap and spyware]
my system works fine, it just have a much worse issue with free hard disk space
The trouble is that because Microsoft dominates the market, most things they do produce become standard. Not because they’re any good but because Microsoft packages the stuff with the system so as soon as people upgrade, 90%+ of the computing community will have it on their system: Window’s media, Internet Explorer, DirectX, MS Word…
The true standards should always be ones that work on all systems and all machines: Quicktime, divx, xvid, OpenGL, unix-based systems, pdf…
So, what you guys are saying is, dont download SP2 just yet?
(god, i’d love to partition my drive and run linux, but that would confuse my mom too much)
BMD
ROFL. I used to have the same problem. I tried to tell her that SBC Yahoo DSL Internet Browser wasnt good, and Mozilla was a lot better, but she
A) Did not understand
B) Did not think she could check her email from Mozilla (Ya, It’s pretty wierd)
Well, I downloaded it… and found blender didn’t work :o (as well as my canon printer - found the fix to the printer on the net)… so I uninstalled SP2 and blender worked again, first try.
So… I wouldn’t bother with SP2.
Just my 2 cents 
I wasn’t going to install SP2 for awhile, but the damned updates icon kept flashing at me and annoying me every day. So I gave in to Microsoft’s pressure tactics and installed SP2.
OMG what a mistake.
Ever since then, I’ve been having nothing but problems. The computer spontaneously reboots in the middle of the day for no reason. Programs randomly stop responding. Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work anymore to bring up Task Manager to kill the crashed programs, so I have to use the reset button on my computer. I haven’t touched the reset button in over a year of normal computing with XP SP1, but ever since I installed SP2 I am forced to use it several times per day since Task Manager doesn’t work.
Moral of the story: Don’t give in to the pressure tactics. Wait a few more months until there are plenty of patches to patch up the patches and they’ll get everything sorted out eventually.
what do you people have on your computers that have issues with service pack 2?!
my machine has nothing you wouldn’t really expect [except perhaps mcaffee virus scan] to see in a well configured and well maintained system.
people were saying while it was still a release canidate that spyware or other applications that integrate themselves too deep into the OS would cause problems.
my system hasn’t been any more or less stable, applications that used to quit unexpectedly [games] still do just as often [say, at worst, after half an hour], and applications that wouldnt’ crash [notepad!!!] do not
that said, I have managed to mess up my system since installing service pack 2 by:
creating a disk image of my [3Gb] c drive
loading it to a new drive
booting it [the new drive]
renaming the [original, still named that way] c drive to another letter
rebooting
I bet it was mcaffee that wanted something off that drive, but I can’t really be sure [it also started in safe mode, coul’ve been anything that deep, like ati drivers even]
SP2 hasn’t caused any problems for me. No application conflicts, games running well, etc. etc. Even the installation itself was painless.
Firewall is the easiest to configure I’ve seen. Though its effectiveness is still questionable (I think ZoneAlarm would do a better job).
Application software I’ve tested that works with SP2 (alphabetically listed):- Adobe Reader 6
- Apple Quicktime 6
- Avast! 4
- Awaron Tucan 7.0
- Blender 2.34
- Blizzard Warcraft III TFT
- Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8
- Microsoft Office XP Pro (Access, Excel, Powerpoint, Word)
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 (VB and C++)
- Spybot Search and Destroy 1.3
- SSH Secure Shell 3.2.3
- Yafray 0.0.7
- … and of course, the standard MS internet and media stuff (IE6, Messenger, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, etc.).
Perhaps it would be a good idea for others to post software they know to work with SP2.
Oh man %| I can’t believe all you people. SP2 is not the problem, it is the operator 95% of the time. As someone posted many days ago about having major slow downs after sp2; ever check to see if all your essential services are running, or was it a cracked version? I just don’t get it, I have not had one problem with any win(X) software since I first started using windows 3.11. Well maybe windowsME, that program just sucked arse anyway.
The truth is, we could say the same thing, Blender vs Maya is like Linux vs Windows … :-? it is not the tool, it is how you use it.
Yeah and I suppose we wouldn’t have security problems if people would just stop writing viruses or hacking into other peoples private property. I vote for the one stike and your beheaded law. Death to all criminal scum!
Yeah yeah, machines don’t make mistakes people do, blah blah. The fact is that if it was a recognisable mistake made by the operator, those operators wouldn’t be here complaining. All they did was run the update. It shouldn’t matter what manner of software is on the system. You could blame the user for anything - if Windows users don’t boot up their systems then they’ll never go wrong, problem solved. An OS as popular as Windows should be able to handle the heat because it’s in such a position that failures on a large scale are not acceptable. If it isn’t up to the task then it should step down from the plate before it takes the computing world with it. They say you can’t destroy the internet, well Microsoft are going about it the right way.
Hold me back, please. I’m not sure which one you’re comparing Windows with but Blender and Maya are both good tools so I don’t see the analogy. 
You wouldn’t have security problems if Windows didn’t have security flaws and bugs. If you consider Fort Knox and your local Wal-Mart, which is going to get robbed more often?
pop up blocker and an annoying task icon reminding me that anti virus protection says ‘check status’.
cant believe that some guys still ahve all this nagging services of the old bloated lady XP enabled.
With a couple of tweaks you can get rid of all this nonsens microsoft imposed on us and get rock steady and much faster OS.
I heard Longhorn will be a bit like a OSX clone, just better. Thats why they take so long…just heard it. Not realy interested in it until its on my HD
OS= a system to operate your box. Thats all there is to it.
I prefer linux over win, but there are so many cool .exe out there, so I cant live without it. 
anyway
:Z this will get you rocking and rolling:
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=96908
btw. dont you dare get SP2. It ll only bloat your system with unnecessary sheit.
security issue? get a firewall, go firefox. we should get rid of all this hidden microsoft stuff instead of loading even more of it into the hidden dungeons of windows [!]
edit: just checked the bookmark and the guy edited his post, in fact he made a novel out of it. so for the inpatient, and to start tweaking:
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm
btw. the CGTalk thread is worth reading, but you might as well scan over the text and follow the links in the following posts 
probably fort knox
Alltaken
[quote=“Alltaken”]
probably fort knox
Alltaken[/quote]
Nope, more people will try to rob Fort Knox but more will succeed in robbing Wal Mart.
I heard that from a Windows-biased source too. I’m sure they said the same about XP. You might be right in that Longhorn could be better than Mac OS X is now but then in 2 years when it comes out, Mac OS X will be 2 years ahead at least. I doubt it will even be better than X now though because I don’t recall hearing they were making their system open-source or basing it on unix.
probably fort knox
Alltaken[/quote]
Nope, more people will try to rob Fort Knox but more will succeed in robbing Wal Mart.[/quote]
Ok, lets stay with the Wal Mart analogy.
Assuming every Wal Mart uses the same lock numbers on its safe, same security patterns and all that.
If stores in a town are pretty much all Wal Marts by a 90% proportion, are you going to try to crack their security or that of the random Joe Sales on the corner of the street?
Now, this doesn’t mean Wal Mart will be robbed more, but there’s certainly more people that are going to try. In a non perfect system, that would statiscly mean a lot more chance of someone finding a weakness, don’t you think?
Martin