O/T Windows Service Pack 3

[jr45acp]

When I booted my pc this morning I got a notification that said service pack was available to update my system. Not being a whiz with puters, I went ahead and started the process. I began at 0700 and it's now roughly 1520 and the blasted thing still isn't finished. Does anyone have any thoughts? Maybe Evan will weigh in on this.

[aboard_epsilon]

if you are on 56k modem ...then i suppose it will take that long

I'm not, my line is about 6.8 mb......took less than an hour ..

that was about 2 months ago ..

all the best.markj

[laddy]

Sometimes they take forever and sometimes they get interrupted and then wait to restart or fail to restart...usually it takes forever. If you get tired of it close it and do it before you go to bed and let it hassle through all night. The devil machine...I hate it. Fred

[jr45acp]

I have a DSL internet connection and I really didn't think it would take this long. I guess, I'll just hang tough and wait it out. It is finally at the point of "finishing installation".

[Carld]

When your doing an update for windows I don't think it's a gook idea to run any programs or use the internet. Any up dates that are brought to my attention I do at night or when I am not using it.

[smiller6912]

So, I just did it on a cable to check it out and, it took 1hr/ 7min to finish.

[Evan]

I haven't even looked into SP3 yet. I am not having any notable problems with my XP SP2 machines and the service pack is undoubtably huge so I'm not going to try and download it on my satellite connection which is quite slow. If I were to try it would get me "fapped" (Fair Access Policy) and my connection would be rolled back to dialup speed for a while.

[lazlo]

I haven't even looked into SP3 yet. I am not having any notable problems with my XP SP2 machines and the service pack is undoubtably huge

Service Pack 3 is about 330 MBytes :)

It's mostly a tarball of all the hotfixes and security updates since Service Pack 2. There's a total of 1,174 fixes (!)

One thing it definitely fixed is that Windows XP up to SP2 won't hibernate reliably with more than 1 GByte of RAM. There was a hotfix that you could get directly from Microsoft, but SP3 contains the fix, and it does work correctly on my laptop with 2 GByte of RAM.

[Peter Sanders]

Hi

When your doing an update for windows I don't think it's a gook idea to run any programs or use the internet. Any up dates that are brought to my attention I do at night or when I am not using it.

IMHO. "When you're doing an update for windows I don't think it's a good idea"! period! :)

Unless your pc has some problems that YOU KNOW the SP will fix, problems that ARE causing you some difficulty, then my advise is leave well enough alone.

Be prepared for potential "odd" thing happening. Your computer may not work quite the same way as it did before.

I have my pc that has the XP SP2 OS on it. I have never done any updates. I turn OFF the automatic updates as I do for my clients. My pc does not "wander off" to MS and let MS do ITS thing to my pc. I want to know the status of my pc. All these pcs still work as well as the did when installed.

[lazlo]

Unless your pc has some problems that YOU KNOW the SP will fix, problems that ARE causing you some difficulty, then my advise is leave well enough alone.

Peter, the problem with that is that the vast majority of the hotfixes that Microsoft releases are security fixes for known exploits.

The bad guys troll the hot fixes for easy hacks, and then look for folks who haven't applied the patches yet.

[smiller6912]

Hi


IMHO. "When you're doing an update for windows I don't think it's a good idea"! period! :)

Unless your pc has some problems that YOU KNOW the SP will fix, problems that ARE causing you some difficulty, then my advise is leave well enough alone.

Be prepared for potential "odd" thing happening. Your computer may not work quite the same way as it did before.

I have my pc that has the XP SP2 OS on it. I have never done any updates. I turn OFF the automatic updates as I do for my clients. My pc does not "wander off" to MS and let MS do ITS thing to my pc. I want to know the status of my pc. All these pcs still work as well as the did when installed.

I don't think that this is very good advice. The updates are mostly to patch security issues. Your computer may well be running fine but, it is much more vulnerable to malicious attacks. Generally, it is a good idea to do the updates ASAP.

[lazlo]

Does anyone read the previous posts anymore, especially the one immediately before? :)

[Evan]

There is another reason to allow auto updates. If you work on someone else's machine turn it on, not off. If a problem occurs it will be the fault of Microsoft, not you.

[mochinist]

I have mine set to tell me there is an update and download it, but I choose when to install it. The only reason I do this is because their updates have a tendency to screw up other programs. What I usually do after it tells me there is an update is do a google search for the ("update name"+problems). This saved me a few weeks ago when they did an update and it made zonealarm lock down the computer and you couldnt get on the net. Even though I am not nearly as computer savvy as some of you guys on here the friends and family tend to think of me as the go to guy for their computer issues and I think I got about four calls asking me to help because their computers had automatically updated and now they couldnt surf the net. As it was zonealarm fixed it within about a week and I did the install and everything was fine.

[smiller6912]

Does anyone read the previous posts anymore, especially the one immediately before? :)
Yes, I read it. However, I felt that reiteration and reinforcement was appropriate................