Service Pack 2, worth it? recommend, programs, upgrade, about

andy

Hey all, well i've had the thought of upgrading to Service Pack 2 for
XP but i've read that i could mess your codecs and other programs
for Video conversion...

I still have Service Pack 1 and all works great, but i'm a bit scared to upgrade if it is going to ruin all the stuff i have installed in my PC.

Could anyone post any info about this?,
How many of you guys have Service Pack 2?
Has it messed any programs that you had installed?, which?
Would you recommend upgrading?

That is all, thanks

No such thing, vdub, megui, works well with sp2

besides, sp2 come with a firewall which is very useful, simple and you don't need those fancy firewalls that will slow start up etc... but that firewall is not good enough if your computer is not a personal computer

I've heard a few people saying they won't install Service Pack 2 because they heard that it will mess up their programs and things.  Usually people saying this are completely uninformed and  call 3.5quot; floppy disks 'Hard Disks' because quot;It's not floppy!quot;.  (Yeah, you know the type)

I have yet to come across something that gets messed up with Service Pack 2.  If anyone has a problem with it it's usually because their machine is infested with Viruses or Spyware/Malware and those caused problems.

The best thing to do is this:

1) Use Spybot Search amp; Destroy along with Ad-Aware both with uptodate libraries (i.e. UPDATE them!)

2) Use AVG Anti-Virus to do a full system scan for Viruses/Trojans/etc.

3) Right click on your hard drive, select properties, go to the Tools tab and click on the 'Check Now' button.  Checkmark BOTH options and click on 'Start'.  Another window will pop up asking if you want to schedule the check the next time you start your computer say YES.  Reboot your computer and let it run.  It might take quite a long time depending on the size of your computer.  This is IMPORTANT!  Do this when you go to bed or something if you don't want to wait around to monitor it.

4) Once the disk check has been done your computer will come back up and now you want to go back to that same Tools tab above and defragment the filesystem.  Let it run to completion.

Once all that is done, you've prepped your system for updating to Service Pack 2.  Before you run the install on the service pack kill all unnecessary background processes like Instant Messengers, Quicktime/Realplayer/Java crap (shouldn't be running anyhow.. disable that crap!), ANYTHING extra in your task tray that you absolutely do not need running.

Oh another thing.. if you use a Virtual CD program like Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120%, you're going to want to either unmount anything you have mounted or uninstall the programs completely.  You can reinstall them afterwards.  If you don't do this you might get an atapi.sys error.  It's annoying but it'll pop up midway during the install of SP2 if you have one of those programs.  This happened to me and I just had the installation keep going (I forget if I clicked on skip or ignore...) and after a reboot the correct atapi.sys was upgraded anyhow.

Some people say they have performance issues after upgrading to SP2.  Usually this is due to them not optimizing their hard drive after the upgrade.  You also need to clear out the prefetch cache too.  Just do general maintenance.

Typically anyone I've come across who complained about SP2 were just people who didn't take care of their machine anyhow.

Some people say they have performance issues after upgrading to SP2. Usually this is due to them not optimizing their hard drive after the upgrade. You also need to clear out the prefetch cache too. Just do general maintenance.

Yes, the startup speed, there are more services in sp2, i turn many useless services off with the guides found in google, that will save around 20-30 MB of RAM, other than that, it's perfectly normal

Actually every service pack for every Windows is incompatible with some hardware, one of my clients was quot;luckyquot; enough to have one. That was a long night of reinstalling stuff. One failure out of hundreds of successes I've seen, however.

Avisynth also falls victim to a peculiar bug in SEH handling, that kills hosts instead of popping up a normal exception message; 2.5.7 will have that worked around.

I have sp2 installed, by using the windows quot;autoupdatequot;.
So far i didnt have any problem with it.
but i (may be)have performance problem when shutting down my computer, it takes nearly 1 minutes to complete shutdown or log off, i have to disconnect the network connectioin manually to solve this problem  

i might be wrong,
but if you wan to upgrade to SP2, better use the autoupdate feature,
i still remember my computer failed to operate(copy paste doesnt work, user interface broked, etc etc),
after install the xp2 that downloaded from some software site(im so dumb )...

Download the network installer, slipstream your existing Windows CD and do a complete reinstall. Not only will that ensure that the upgrade process (which is 99.999 reliable) won't bite you, but you also ensure that you're starting with a clean windows, and a renewed fast one (things just get slower over time no matter how careful you are with not installing too much software).

And whoever tells you not to use SP2 should be flogged.. security wise it's like having sex with a prostitute without a condom. While SP2 isn't as good as a condom, it gives you a good baseline protection as long as you make sure you always install the latest security patches on top of it. The rest (specifically viruses) it's up to you.. it's perfectly possible to not ever be infected by being smart about email handling and not installing any software from untrustworthy sources (that includes software friends or colleagues have downloaded from untrustworthy sources).


Originally Posted by Doom9Download the network installer, slipstream your existing Windows CD and do a complete reinstall. Not only will that ensure that the upgrade process (which is 99.999 reliable) won't bite you, but you also ensure that you're starting with a clean windows, and a renewed fast one (things just get slower over time no matter how careful you are with not installing too much software).

This is exactly what I do nowadays.  I use nLite to slipstream both SP2 as well as every security patch that has come out.  It's nice to do a fresh install of XP that has all the patches already.

version 2.0 that can only be installed if you have SP2 installed.  This is what made me take the great leap, glad I did no problems attributed to it yet.

My laptop actually required a BIOS upgrade to use SP2. It is one of the first Athlon 64 models out and choked on the Data Execution Prevention stuff. Needless to say, I put off using SP2 until that issue was cleared up.

DEP can always be disabled.  It's just on by default.

Don't worry about installing SP2.... It wont be long before we'll get SP3

LOL, ok...
After reading all the positive reviews about SP2, i will install it.

I'll let you guys know how everthing worked out.

In the mean time, thanks for all your help.

Cheers

If my memory serves me right when I've installed SP2 on not so fresh WXP it's crashed  I recommend to make bootable CD with WXP+SP2 integrated and install new system... maybe it was just an accident but it was really bad experience.
One way or another - good luck!

//sorry for my English!

we won't see SP3 before mid 2007...

SP3 with TPM enabled...

SP2 give me no problems. I did stop a few, rather useless, processes at startup though.

@artoor
Your written English is better than a lot of posters born in the USA.