This morning, Automatic Update wants to install Service Pack 2 on my computer. There have been cries and whispers from my university’s computing services that SP2 is so full of holes that they aren’t going to install it on university computers until Microsoft comes out with a patch.
Is this true? Does anyone know anything about it?
Try looking here for some info.
Basically what you heard, IMHO, isn’t true. There isn’t going to be a patch for SP2 because it doesn’t need one. It’s true that it have some issues with other software e.g. Norton Antivirus, Zonealarm, Unreal 2004, and you may need to patch these programs if you go with SP2.
Basically if you’ve kept your machine up to date so far with the latest paches and you already have a firewall installed then you don’t need SP2 right now.
You will need to install it someday though (for example if a SP3 comes out!) but there’s no rush at the moment.
What Ponster said.
I’ve installed SP2 on my work PC and have had no problems. In fact it even detected that I was running AVG Anti-Virus. I also have had no problems whatsoever with Sygate Personal Firewall since the upgrade.
Eventually you will have to install it. It’s up to you when you decide.
What are the issues with Norton Antivirus and Zonealarm - I use both. Are there fixes available from the Norton and Zonealarm people?
Do you use Bittorrent? When I installed SP2, whenever I tried to download a bittorrented file, all other web connections would fail to work on my machine, even though the torrent wasn’t anywhere near to maxing out my connection. I removed SP2, and can now surf the web and download a torrent at the same time again. I think this is because SP2 doesn’t like large numbers of incoming TCP/IP connections.
That’s correct. Rather than making them secure, Microsoft have simply put a cap on the number of open connections. There’s plenty of tweaks out there to change this, if you Google for them.
What you can do now that you’ve uninstalled SP2, is:[ul][li] Go to C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS and backup the file TCPIP.SYS to another directory.[/li][li]Re-install SP2.[/li][li]Boot into “Safe Mode” and Copy your backed up TCPIP.SYS file to these directories:[/li]C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS
C:\WINDOWS\SERVICEPACKFILES\I386
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DLLCACHE
[*]Re-boot your system and you’re good to go. [/ul]I too use Bittorrent and was pissed off to find that they limited the number of outgoing connections. The intent is to prevent DDS attacks from unsecured machines but it renders Bittorrent virtually useless. Whether that was also intended, I don’t know.