OK, I give up...

[marauder307]

Gonna need some tech advice....from the computer techies.

My desktop tried to auto-update with Windows XP Service Pack 2 Fri. night/Sat. morning...download started at sometime around midnight. It downloaded okay, but I gave up at 3 a.m. waiting around for the installation to finish and went to bed, leaving the 'puter to it's own devices. When I woke up at 7, the durn thing was still trying to install. The computer literally ran through the night with this thing.

I cancelled the install, and after an hour of restarts and resets, was able to get the system restored, but now I have a new problem: I can't get the service pack to download again!

Anybody got any ideas on this? I figured I was reasonably computer-literate, but this has got me completely flummoxed...Do I even need it?

[FiveO]

Great....

My laptop said it was ready to d/l SP2...and I ok'ed it.

Still no OK to install.....wonder what will happen.


I'll update when I visit Microsoft updates and see what happens.

Could be thtat MS servers are just that busy with this....

[duhtroll]

Knowing MS well -

I would give this SP 2 thing a few weeks for them to work out the bugs. And there always will be bugs. Hackers do whatever they can to bring down MS, and it takes tons of work to stay one step behind them.

-A

[BruteForce]

Yes you need it. There are dozens of holes patched with this SP.

As with anything software installation related, the time it takes to complete is greatly influenced by your system specs. My heavily loaded and modified (say... that's sounds familiar) P4 3GHz, RAID 0 arrays, 2 GB RAM, etc, etc took about 15-20 minutes to install once it had downloaded. Even a low spec machine shouldn't take more than an hour tops.

Third party firewalls are rumored to be a problem.

[BillyGman]

Third party firewalls are rumored to be a problem.
By "third party" do you mean like Zonealarm? And if so, how do you mean a "problem"? U mean as far as them slowing down the downloads, or allowing hackers in? Please explain.

[BruteForce]

XP SP2 has its own firewall and its turned on by default when the SP is applied. There are likely to be conflicts when you have 2 gate keepers. I don't have firsthand experience sine I have always used a hardware firewall on my network.

[BillyGman]

Okay BF. Thanks for your reply.

[Dr Caleb]

By "third party" do you mean like Zonealarm? And if so, how do you mean a "problem"? U mean as far as them slowing down the downloads, or allowing hackers in? Please explain.

Like Brute said, but more . . . XP SP2 doesn't recognize that you have a firewall. They've changed the spec so third party firewalls (and virus scanners) can tell Xp that they exist, then XP reports that they exist in the new 'Security' part of Control Panel. You firewall/scanner will be working and protecting you, just XP doesn't know that (and still uses it's own firewall).

As well, XPSP2 makes some drastic changes to how networking and the internet in general works. Some utilities and P2P programs that used 'low level' network communications will break under XPSP2.

But SP2 fixes much more than it breaks. I've seen much worse service packs from MS. (NT 4.0 SP6 comes to mind)

[marauder307]

Well, this does explain a lot...due to my cablemodem connection (I run the "slow" option from Charter Hi-Speed), I've got BlackIce on my computer. It's pretty stout, but it also gums up the works sometimes...and the system baselining part of the program takes a good 20-25 minutes to run whenever you add something to the system.

As a reference, I'm running a Dell 2400, 2.2Ghz, 256mb RAM, CD-ROM, CD-Burner (don't remember what speed for either of 'em), just added a 128mb GeForce 5200FX card a few weeks back (had to---can't run Splinter Cell: PT without it!), and a bunch of other stuff.

If I can ever get the thing to download again, I'll have to turn BlackIce off. I don't feel real comfortable doing that, but it sounds like the only option if I want this to work. I'm still stuck with the problem of how to get it to download again, tho...maybe it'll auto-update itself.

'Preciate the help fellas...!