ARGH - SP2 woes
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Well, very cautiously, I decided to install XP SP2 on my laptop and see how it works. I'd love to have those security features, and have pop-up blocker for IE (no Mozilla on the laptop... yet...) Before starting, though, I made sure I had an up-to-date DriveImage backup. So here are the results. :-D Well, it actually boots, no bluescreens. :( After the first reboot, everything was S-L-O-W. A second reboot seems to have mitigated this, though, but not completely. It is still noticeably slower than before SP2. :wtf: Wireless client no longer works. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop. Even when turning the firewall completely off, it still fails. So unless anyone here has any good ideas, I'll be rolling it back, as a laptop that is slow and has no network is useless to me. Well, I guess Microsoft often has one "bad" service pack per OS... for NT it was SP4, and for XP it looks like it's SP2. So I suppose I'll wait for SP3 and go from there. Just one man's story. So I stick to my advice to be very, very cautious when installing SP2, and make sure you have a full backup so you can reinstall XP if necessary. An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
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Well, very cautiously, I decided to install XP SP2 on my laptop and see how it works. I'd love to have those security features, and have pop-up blocker for IE (no Mozilla on the laptop... yet...) Before starting, though, I made sure I had an up-to-date DriveImage backup. So here are the results. :-D Well, it actually boots, no bluescreens. :( After the first reboot, everything was S-L-O-W. A second reboot seems to have mitigated this, though, but not completely. It is still noticeably slower than before SP2. :wtf: Wireless client no longer works. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop. Even when turning the firewall completely off, it still fails. So unless anyone here has any good ideas, I'll be rolling it back, as a laptop that is slow and has no network is useless to me. Well, I guess Microsoft often has one "bad" service pack per OS... for NT it was SP4, and for XP it looks like it's SP2. So I suppose I'll wait for SP3 and go from there. Just one man's story. So I stick to my advice to be very, very cautious when installing SP2, and make sure you have a full backup so you can reinstall XP if necessary. An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
What wireless card are you using? My Linksys 54g card works perfectly. There are new screens (and tolbar icons) for the wireless stuff. Steve
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Well, very cautiously, I decided to install XP SP2 on my laptop and see how it works. I'd love to have those security features, and have pop-up blocker for IE (no Mozilla on the laptop... yet...) Before starting, though, I made sure I had an up-to-date DriveImage backup. So here are the results. :-D Well, it actually boots, no bluescreens. :( After the first reboot, everything was S-L-O-W. A second reboot seems to have mitigated this, though, but not completely. It is still noticeably slower than before SP2. :wtf: Wireless client no longer works. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop. Even when turning the firewall completely off, it still fails. So unless anyone here has any good ideas, I'll be rolling it back, as a laptop that is slow and has no network is useless to me. Well, I guess Microsoft often has one "bad" service pack per OS... for NT it was SP4, and for XP it looks like it's SP2. So I suppose I'll wait for SP3 and go from there. Just one man's story. So I stick to my advice to be very, very cautious when installing SP2, and make sure you have a full backup so you can reinstall XP if necessary. An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
I've installed it on five desktops and two laptops so far with no problems. Actually one minor problem, the virtual device driver for PocketPC emulator doesn't work. I can live with that though.
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What wireless card are you using? My Linksys 54g card works perfectly. There are new screens (and tolbar icons) for the wireless stuff. Steve
And what's about the speed of your laptop? I have quite slow laptop now, I have there norton av, firewall, sql server,... and IBM messages. I want to deny autorun of last two, but I lazy to go to registry:-)
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Well, very cautiously, I decided to install XP SP2 on my laptop and see how it works. I'd love to have those security features, and have pop-up blocker for IE (no Mozilla on the laptop... yet...) Before starting, though, I made sure I had an up-to-date DriveImage backup. So here are the results. :-D Well, it actually boots, no bluescreens. :( After the first reboot, everything was S-L-O-W. A second reboot seems to have mitigated this, though, but not completely. It is still noticeably slower than before SP2. :wtf: Wireless client no longer works. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop. Even when turning the firewall completely off, it still fails. So unless anyone here has any good ideas, I'll be rolling it back, as a laptop that is slow and has no network is useless to me. Well, I guess Microsoft often has one "bad" service pack per OS... for NT it was SP4, and for XP it looks like it's SP2. So I suppose I'll wait for SP3 and go from there. Just one man's story. So I stick to my advice to be very, very cautious when installing SP2, and make sure you have a full backup so you can reinstall XP if necessary. An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
> So unless anyone here has any good ideas, I'll be rolling it back, Whatever happened to diagnosing problems and looking for solutions--we're all developers here. SP2 is a definitive step forward, even though it introduced one problem on one of my machines. I'm not giving up on it and going back to SP1 though...
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Well, very cautiously, I decided to install XP SP2 on my laptop and see how it works. I'd love to have those security features, and have pop-up blocker for IE (no Mozilla on the laptop... yet...) Before starting, though, I made sure I had an up-to-date DriveImage backup. So here are the results. :-D Well, it actually boots, no bluescreens. :( After the first reboot, everything was S-L-O-W. A second reboot seems to have mitigated this, though, but not completely. It is still noticeably slower than before SP2. :wtf: Wireless client no longer works. Which defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop. Even when turning the firewall completely off, it still fails. So unless anyone here has any good ideas, I'll be rolling it back, as a laptop that is slow and has no network is useless to me. Well, I guess Microsoft often has one "bad" service pack per OS... for NT it was SP4, and for XP it looks like it's SP2. So I suppose I'll wait for SP3 and go from there. Just one man's story. So I stick to my advice to be very, very cautious when installing SP2, and make sure you have a full backup so you can reinstall XP if necessary. An expert is somebody who learns more and more about less and less, until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.
SP3 is likely to be a very long way from here, and I don't think you'll want to miss out. To fix the slowness, defrag your hard disk. After that it should be quicker. If not, you may just be unlucky. Some system binaries are a bit bigger so more memory or a faster hard disk will help. For the wireless card, you could try going to the connection's Advanced tab and uncheck the option to have Windows manage your connection settings. You should then get the manufacturer's configuration UI instead (I think!) I also have a LinkSys 54G card based on a Broadcom chipset, but that's at home, not here at work. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder