Ken Blake said:
In Carey Frisch [MVP] <
[email protected]> typed:
I certainly agree that the odds are excellent, but I'm never
willing to say that they are 100%. However unlikely, it is always
possible that something can go wrong. For that reason it's
prudent to be sure you have a backup of anything you can't afford
to lose before beginning.
There are far too many people with agenda's here who will swear
one way or the other what the odds are but I don't think that
ANYBODY who has a statistically valid sample is telling what the
real odds are. Microsoft knows and they certainly aren't telling.
There have been fruitloops, even with credentials, who have sworn
that there are ZERO bugs in the five million lines of code that were
supposedly changed for SP2, you can search for the several such
postings here claiming this and find them in google. If that were
true then this would be the first time in the history of computing
that this had ever been accomplished. I offered to bet a couple of
these individuals $100,000 and a loaded pistol on whether this was
true or not. They wouldn't take the bet.
To be fair, Sp2 likely fixed a few thousand small and massive
f&&kups in XP, they spent years and maybe a billion dollars on this,
you would certainly hope so. But the history of software almost
guarantees that it introduced probably a few hundred small and
massive f&&kups. That is just what people have found in fifty years
of experience patching software.
The majority of folks with configurations similar to what were
tested before the release of this will likely not have problems.
There are ZERO guarantees in this, anyone rational will agree with
that. Preparation is always a good idea, who could disagree with
that. But that does not guarantee it will work. I and 200 other
people have reported here being hit with the "Windows Explorer Bug"
and thus far less than a dozen have ever reported getting a fix for
this, even though almost every one of these people had no viruses,
etc, etc... I spend an hour or two with Microsoft support every few
days still trying to get them to actually diagnose the source of
this. They keep randomly asking me to try something, I do, it
doesn't find the problem, and we repeat this game. They keep saying
that there is no way to actually diagnose this, that they just keep
checking things to see if they can trip over something and the
problem goes away. We've done virus scans, we've done malware scans,
we've done process scans, we've done dll scans, we've done shell
extension scans, we've done hijack scans, we've renamed things,
we've put them back, we've repeatedly gone around in circles and
tried things that have already been repeatedly tried...
--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup
Windows XP Service Pack 2 Checklist
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/spackins.htm
[Courtesy of MS-MVP Jupiter Jones]
| My mother asked me last night if SP2 for WinXP Home would mess
up
| her computer if she installs it. She has heard quite a few
| disturbing tales on the internet and she has it sitting in her
| Updates are Ready Notice for a while now.
|
| What would be the odds of her having serious problems that she
| couldn't remedy by uninstalling SP2 from the Add/Remove
Software or
| using a Restore Point?
|
| It's not that old a system, having been upgraded over time to
stay
| reasonably current and she has no problems with XP Home itself
at
| this time. It's been much more stable than 98 was for her.
|
| Are the odds good, bad, 1 in 10, etc?
|
| Thanks
