Digital Rights, Digital Wrongs

By Jerry Pournelle

August 16, 2004

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A goodly part of this month's column consists of reports on silly things I did so you don't have to. There are also observations on upgrade decisions. The good news is that reading it may save you a lot of time and maybe a little money. Meanwhile, the big news is that by the time you read this, Windows XP Service Pack 2 will be out.

I know that some web sites have been advising readers to wait: enable automatic downloads, and let Microsoft decide when to send you SP2. The alternative is to go to the Microsoft Download Center and get it yourself as soon as Microsoft posts it.

I'd recommend that most readers just go get it. The exception would be IT managers with a lot of machines running older or specialized software, where I'd advise some tests before widespread deployment. Early reports say that SP2 breaks some poorly-written applications, particularly any that take advantage of flaws in Windows or Internet Explorer to run just a little faster. If your company relies on custom apps, you should have been testing their compatibility with SP2 for quite some time, especially if you use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripts, or anonymous/unregistered COM objects. Most anti-virus applications will also require an update to be compatible with SP2, as well.

Service Pack 2 has been pretty thoroughly tested, with an Alpha, a Beta, and two release candidates. I've run first Release Candidate 1 and then RC2 for months now on three machines: Sable, a RAMBUS D850MV with 3.06 Pentium 4 and 533 Front Side Bus; Anastasia, a DDR400 D875PBZ with 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 and 800 FSB; and Lisabetta, the HP-Compaq TabletPC (about 1 GHz Intel Pentium M CPU). Sable is my main writing machine but also does a lot of web browsing and computational work as well as games; Anastasia is my main communications machine; and Lisabetta was the only machine I carried with me on a number of trips including the April 2004 WinHEC where I installed XP SP2 RC2. Thus all three machines have got a lot of heavy use, and Lisabetta has been pretty thoroughly exposed to the Internet through wireless as well as dialup, and once through a hotel's high-speed connection.

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