BYTE.com > Chaos Manor > 2004
Beta Test Manor
By Jerry Pournelle
April 12, 2004
(Beta Test Manor
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Column 285
I'd intended a different lead, but this is topical:
"Beta Test Manor," a Chaos Manor Service
XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 1, or,
"That's why they call it a Beta"
Just a few days ago, Microsoft put Release Candidate 1 of Windows XP Service Pack 2 out for public beta. This version is, by the release notes, feature-complete; the preview release in January was mostly meant as an early look for developers and the curious.
Windows XP Service Pack 2, Release Candidate 1 (hereafter, "RC1") is worth a long look, and we gave it one, testing it on the Intel 865-based 3.06 GHz Pentium/4 named Sable and the H-P/Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 (Crusoe chip) named Lisabetta. So far, we're living up to the unofficial name of "Beta Test Manor," bestowed by Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak, where "We do these silly things so you don't have to." Short recommendation: RC1 is ready for testing, but keep it away from your production machines. Well away. The two best known show-stoppers are incompatibility with Cisco's VPN client and with Norton Anti-Virus properly registering with the new Windows Security Center features. These two are far too prominent to go unrepaired for long, but we tripped over more obscure bugs, some irritating, some just plain weird. Wait for the next candidate before putting this on a mission-critical system.
Getting SP2 RC1
SP2 is currently available in the English, German and Japanese versions; the English network-based installer (which includes the entire updated code) is 270 MB (comparable in size to Windows XP itself). Alternately, there's a 1 MB installer front end which downloads only the modules you need, but we only tested the full network installer. As of this writing, the official RC1 web site is
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/sp2preview.mspx.
There are user instructions on the web site itself. This site also has the 156-page "Changes to Functionality in Microsoft XP Service Pack 2."
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