xp is fine - why should I install service pack 2?

[Kevin]

Kevin, you say that you are waiting and later on state that other items are
better. I don't understand how you can profess to know if you haven't tried
it.

Further, there a millions of successful installs that have made those
systems more secure and therefore mine. Our computer club has installed not
only SP2 on all 15 Windows based computers. Now for a contrary position, the
same club has installed Firefox 1.0 as the default browser on the same
computers.

Computer viruses are much like a herd of cattle, immunize 85% and the entire
herd is relatively safe.

Chuck,
The fact that most, if not all, of the security applications provided in SP
2 are inferior to third party software is widely known in the computing
industry. Many of the popular magazines like PC World, PC Magazine and
Computer Shopper Magazine have published numerous articles to that effect.
I won't take the chance of hosing my system until I have a better feeling
about SP 2. Microsoft should have aggressively marketed this major upgrade
to their premiere operating system with considerably more emphasis on
preparing your system for the installation.

When Microsoft releases the SP 2 patches, which will be sooner rather than
later, I will consider installing it, disabling the included security
features. That will all be rendered moot when they make the installation of
Service Pack 2 a prerequisite for further updates, something they are also
going to do sooner rather than later.

 

[John]

If you mean you're on a slow machine, you might also consider
having lots of RAM, maybe a Gig if your mb/CMOS will handle it.

I suspect that at 1GHz, my machine is considered 'slow' but I like to
wait for a factor of five speed improvement before changing machines.
That puts an amusing light on the future - I think microwave cookers
run at x-band (9GHz) as does my satellite broadcasting detector. I
sometimes wonder about what happens with a circuit running at
significant power, in an enclosed space, at these frequencies.

But I expect Intel have it all worked out.

Anyway, to respond to your memory point, when I bought the machine, a
couple of years ago, I was in the throes of converting my music tapes
to CDs and found that I couldn't possibly avoid editing music files to
split tracks reliably, especially since most of my music was
classical. Hence the real need for editing big files - hence I went
for a quicker machine (quicker, then, at any rate) and half a gig of
RAM. I got ample reward and, currently, XP seems to be running as
quickly as 98se did, in the days before I did the sensible thing and
slimmed 98se down with the aid of that wonderful piece of maverick
work, that blow for the freedom of the individual against badly
behaving corporate giants, - 98lite!

But that's OT and naughty of me to mention it.

 

[John]

When Microsoft releases the SP 2 patches, which will be sooner rather than
later, I will consider installing it, disabling the included security
features. That will all be rendered moot when they make the installation of
Service Pack 2 a prerequisite for further updates, something they are also
going to do sooner rather than later.

If an xp newbie can add a word here, when I installed xp with sp1, I
felt reluctant to take on board the massive bulk of sp2 when I had
full faith in my firewall and antiv.

Annoyingly, my firewall wouldn't leave my antiv in peace (the two are
Agnitum Outpost and EZAntivirus). I mucked around for ages and
eventually found that I could get things going again by reverting to
an earlier version of Outpost.

Then, under the almost overwhelming consensus right here, I installed
sp2. Now, the most recent Outpost has stopped mucking up my antiv.

It seems like the old story - the software apps get written for the
new OS versions and old versions start getting in bother. We can put
up a bit of a fight, but sooner or later, the fact that MS has us by
the short and curly, tells.

In my case, in some isolation from the rest of the world, it seems, I
really like Easy CDCreator and packet writing. The most recent
version is a marked improvement on earlier messy work by Roxio, but it
won't run on 98se - so I end up trying xp and then find I need lots
more HDD.

And so it goes.

I ought to confess, however, that I do really like getting in to new
technology - I may be 69 but my science training has me in its grip
for ever.

 

[J&P]

........................................................ XP seems to be
running as
quickly as 98se did, in the days before I did the sensible thing and
slimmed 98se down with the aid of that wonderful piece of maverick
work, that blow for the freedom of the individual against badly
behaving corporate giants, - 98lite!

But that's OT and naughty of me to mention it.

John, you may be able to do the same with XP. XPlite is available from the
same source.

If you do use XPlite, perhaps you report back and tell us the results.

Regards,
Joe Steele

 

[John]

John, you may be able to do the same with XP. XPlite is available from the
same source.

If you do use XPlite, perhaps you report back and tell us the results.

Shane Brooks (www.litepc.com) has offered xplite and 2000lite for some
time. My experience with 98lite, these past few years, has been
almost entirely positive.

Beyond that, as a newbie, I suspect I should not go.

More directly on topic is the fact that, yesterday, when first using
my xp installation of my Epson software to 'scan to email' I didn't
find it all that easy to release xp's hold on its choice of emailer.
(I'm happily running my 98se installation of Eudora out of xp) . It
seems that MS has obeyed the court's direction to loosen its hold in a
thoroughly grudging fashion. I ended up sorting my scan to email but
then found that I could no longer get IE6 until I gave back permission
to xp to use the MS apps, including outlook express, which I detest -
this is just plain silly and I have no doubt at all that xplite, as
did 98lite, will emancipate users from this kind of MS bullying.

Looking back at that para, I see that the description of issues in
dual-booting can get a little difficult to describe concisely and
unambiguously. I apologise for my own rather limited success at it.