Pick a time for SP2 - and be ignored

[GwydionM]

I've been trying to get an automatic download of SP2. It says 'pick a time', lets me choose, and then goes back to its original default.

Has anyone else had this?

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A view from the UK

 

[bcastner]

The availability of Service Pack 2 is being controlled to prevent server congestion at Microsoft and general chaos on the web as a whole. You can imagine what would happen if several million were downloading a 260 MB file.

In addition, only a certain number of XP Home updates are granted daily, the preference for XP Professional being that there is felt a greater need for the security features in commercial settings.

 

[GwydionM]

I'm not arguing with the process taking time. I'm offended that Microsoft act as if they were offering a choice, and then don't do so. I'm offended that they can't be bothered to tell anyone when updates will actually be available.

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A view from the UK

 

[haslo]

Actually, there were people distributing the SP2 over BitTorrent. But they were shut down by Microsoft. Sucks, because that download link would easily have had the capacity to support several millions of simultaneous downloads - after all, it's P2P...

haslo@haslo.ch - www.haslo.ch​

 

[cmeagan656]

Quote:"...being that there is felt a greater need for the security features in commercial settings."

As far as I can see, at least with the computers I deal with, its the home users that need SP2 more than commercial users.

Commercial users are generally behind hardware firewalls, spam filters, antivirus on servers and clients, and IE lockdowns.

Home users =may= have a hardware firewall, although generally they go for a free software version, and usually have antivirus (but don't necessarily check it regulary to see if the dat files are up to date) and have no IE lockdowns. This weekend I've cleaned 3 of my friends' computers of everything from Cool Web Search to Netsky to Sasser and Bagle.

 

[micker377]

haslo:

I've heard (more lies from MicroShaft?), that people were having problems with SP2 installs due to "corrupted" files due to P2P.

 

[haslo]

Hm, sounds very much not reasonable to me, P2P is just another technology to download your files, with error checking and all. Corrupt file fragments are just downloaded again, according to their FAQ BitTorrent uses SHA1 hashing. If those users had problems with data corruption, it happened on their end (meaning on their harddisk) and had nothing to do with the download itself...

haslo@haslo.ch - www.haslo.ch​

 

[jrbarnett]

What we have done where I am is download the file once, then saved it to a network share and burned it to CD, rather than have everybody connect to WindowsUpdate and possibly saturate the internet connection.

I myself have updated one XP Pro laptop and home desktop over the last couple of days, with another couple of machines to do that will probably end up waiting until next weekend now.

So far the only problem I have heard of is a wireless network connection not working properly, but didn't witness this myself so can't give any details on it.

John