Poll: W2K Users: Do you like SP3?

[Vadatajs]

Originally posted by: MartyTheManiak
if it ain't broke, don't fix it...has become my motto


I heard you have to automatically agree to let MS install whatever patches they wish, is this true?

No, you can disable the automatic update service.

 

[Bluefront]

I put SP3 on a Thinkpad A22m today right after a system restore. The install went off without incident....haven't used it enough to comment much, but nothing bad happened yet. Heh..

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: Astaroth33

Originally posted by: Spikesoldier

Originally posted by: MartyTheManiak
Microsoft EULA requests root rights - again


I think I'll stick with SP2, thank you very much.

oh what a reliable source...

The Register isn't reliable?

slashdot link to story and commentary. This is disturbing stuff.

It is called Automatic Windows Update. You can disable it. And Slashdot is about the last place I'd look for unbiased MS information.

 

[Abzstrak]

I usually give MS more time on such extensive updates, and as such hae only installed it on two terminal servers sue to licensing fixes in sp3... I haven't seen any problems with these machines, but then again, two machines is such a small number.....

 

[Tannah]

oh and were would you look for unbiased MS information.
MSNBC? or how about microsoft.com?
Slashdot and the Register I find are relitivly good places for info.. The Register is actually watched by many of the major IT companys as well as Microsoft.. I've found that if somthing is blatenly untrue they will usually recant it and set the record straight.. Though Slashdot is a little off the wall at times.

though you are right you can disable Windows Auto update, and I have yet to see another update that turns it back on.. I went a step futher and shut off the two new things I noticed running under services, that were direcly related to it, that seems to disable it entirely...

anyone heard of any groups mapping out service pack 3? l rember hearing about a few groups doing this to SP2..

 

[TheWart]

haven't noticed a thing, games/apps/networking is pretty much same.

 

[Amused]

I have 2K on my laptop. I fretted over loading this service pack, but did it last night and I'm glad. It fixed three issues I had.

Issue one: My laptop would not go into standby automatically with my Orinoco Gold card in it (Yes, I had the latest drivers). If I removed the card, it would automatically go into standby just fine.

Issue two: If I manually put it into standby with the Gold card in it, it would wake up just fine, but then it would not let me stop the card so I could remove it. It would keep telling me a program was accessing it. I had to shut down the computer to safely remove the card.

Issue three: Sometimes, though very rarely, IE would continue running in the processes list after I had closed it and take up 100% of my CPU cycles thus bogging my computer down to a crawl. (no, I don't have a virus) This was easily corrected by stopping IE from the taskmanger proccesses list, but it was a pain nonetheless.

All three of these issues were fixed with SP3, and I have seen nothing adverse so far.

 

[Thor86]

It gets rid of all those pre-sp3 patch install in your control panel/add remove software screen! You have to manually delete the actual folders though.

 

[Anubis]

i just installed SP3 and i dont notice any differences at all

 

[FinalShaft]

Ever since SP3, Event on Device has failed to work. Before, when I pluged my digicam or scanner in, I would get the Event On Device widow asking which program to launch. Now it pops up, but is blank. I've tried reinstalling the drivers and re-registering programs for the service, but it still shows up as a blank window.

Any one else to confirm?

 

[puck]

SP3 rocks for me. Now I can finally use my firewire compact flash card reader. Previously windows would lose the connection whenever I accessed a card and it would corrupt all my files on the flash card. Now it works perfect!

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: sandigga
i downloaded it but havent installed it yet.. should i?

If I were you I wouldn't install it without first Ghosting your OS partition. I did and I may have to go back to it (Win2k Pro SP2 Ghost image). My DSL doesn't work in Win2k SP3, is the problem. I'm in my Win98SE OS now, you see. A number of other screwy things happed too, such as my VPN software went blooey and my boot times seem significantly longer. YMMV, of course.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: tallest1
I installed it. I THINK Win2k boots a bit faster but don't quote me on that. No complaints though.

And no, I don't see any real changes. But if you look closely, some 'select a folder' and 'save as' windows look different.

I installed it this morning and I've maybe worked out some kinks and now my VPN and Internet connection are working again, but what really depresses me is the fact that Win2k now boots almost 3 times as slow. I didn't care for the 2:10 I needed to boot the OS and open my startup utilities and apps, but the 6+ minutes I'm getting now is all but intolerable. I did Ghost before installing so if I can't work this out somehow I suppose I'll Ghost back my SP2 partition. Bummer. Never had so much trouble with a download before, not even close. My advice? Ghost before you install this thing or you are reckless.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Somewhere there was some reading you were supposed to do before you installed it to see if you really needed it. I didn't have time.

Somewhere? Where? I wanna know, because I'm going to have to Ghost back my SP2 version and either load SP3 again or live with SP2. Can't abide these 6+ minute boots.

 

[Electrode]

I installed it on my P166 laptop yesterday. Other than the Program Access thing and scary-but-easy-to-disable Automatic Updates, it's still the same old OS. I do notice that it tacked on about 200 megs to the base system. Normally that's not something anyone would even notice, but on my 3 GB hard drive, it's a big deal.

Anyone have suggestions for gutting Win2K? I'd love to tear out IE and related junk to make room for some DivX movies.

 

[Moonbeam]

Muse, in the 7/30 date of Anandtech news the second entry is a notificarion of the update on Neowin, but I can't get that site to open today. Maybe it's down or will work for you, but I think that's where I read that.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
Muse, in the 7/30 date of Anandtech news the second entry is a notificarion of the update on Neowin, but I can't get that site to open today. Maybe it's down or will work for you, but I think that's where I read that.

Thanks, Moonbeam. Neowin.net seems to be down right now.

 

[Rottie]

I installed SP3 into my system then boot but I noticed it always re-boot over and over again...no go so I un-installed SP3 and went back to SP2...I don't think SP3 is worth on my system.

 

[bex0rs]

SP3 seems to be incompatible with the standard drivers for Promise Ultra/100 cards, so beware if your boot drive is on such a card. The fix, which worked for me, is to install the latest drivers for their TX2 card. I believe Promise has a note regarding this issue on their website.

Other than that, I haven't noticed any changes or bugs.

~bex0rs

 

[Jeff7181]

I really have no opinion on it. My boot time seems to have decreased dramatically, but other than that, I haven't been noticeably effected by any of the fixes.

 

[matheusber]

where to get it ?
i've been in the M$ site yesterday and didnt find it ...

matheus

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: bex0rs
SP3 seems to be incompatible with the standard drivers for Promise Ultra/100 cards, so beware if your boot drive is on such a card. The fix, which worked for me, is to install the latest drivers for their TX2 card. I believe Promise has a note regarding this issue on their website.

Other than that, I haven't noticed any changes or bugs.

~bex0rs

Well, my boot drive does boot and I have pretty old (the original, I think) for my TX2 Ultra100 Promise card, bought a bit over a year ago. My boot times average 2.5 times as long as with SP2, though. I'll go get the latest Promise driver. However, I don't think I'm going to be able to use SP3 anyway because my Checkpoint VPN client software, "SecuRemote" crashes half the time on startup. Until that issue is addressed by Checkpoint and/or MS, I'm a SP2 user.

 

[bex0rs]

Originally posted by: Muse
Well, my boot drive does boot and I have pretty old (the original, I think) for my TX2 Ultra100 Promise card, bought a bit over a year ago. My boot times average 2.5 times as long as with SP2, though. I'll go get the latest Promise driver.

I believe the problem was only with drivers for the Ultra/100 card, more commonly known as the Maxtor add-in card that people bought through various hot deals. The TX2 card is not the same card - I believe it supports a 66Mhz PCI bus, whereas the regular Ultra/100 does not. I didn't start having boot problems until about 3 or 4 restarts following my SP3 install, but installing the latest TX2 driver did fix the problem. YMMV.

~bex0rs

 

[Moonbeam]

Neowin is back up and this, such as it is, was what I saw: "To determine whether to install Windows 2000 SP3, Microsoft recommends that customers review the Windows 2000 SP3 documentation.".

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: bex0rs

Originally posted by: Muse
Well, my boot drive does boot and I have pretty old (the original, I think) for my TX2 Ultra100 Promise card, bought a bit over a year ago. My boot times average 2.5 times as long as with SP2, though. I'll go get the latest Promise driver.

I believe the problem was only with drivers for the Ultra/100 card, more commonly known as the Maxtor add-in card that people bought through various hot deals. The TX2 card is not the same card - I believe it supports a 66Mhz PCI bus, whereas the regular Ultra/100 does not. I didn't start having boot problems until about 3 or 4 restarts following my SP3 install, but installing the latest TX2 driver did fix the problem. YMMV.

~bex0rs

Installing the latest Windows drivers and the new BIOS for my Promise TX2 Ultra 100 card has turned out to be a real day-wrecker! Things seemed to go fine in my Windows 2000 and my Windows 98SE, but I'm also booting WinNT 4 SP6 on this machine and when I went to install the new Windows driver for NT4 for the Promise card, upon reboot the mouse went absolutely crazy! I tried everything and couldn't fix it. I decided to install the Windows drivers before doing the BIOS update for the card, maybe not the best idea, but it was my idea. I just did the BIOS update and went back into my Windows 2000 to make sure it's OK. It seems a little weird, but maybe it will be alright. Some weird mouse stuff going on in here too. Using MS Intellimouse Explorer optical with the latest driver or close to it. Talk about a crazy MS product, it has to be this mouse. When NT went nuts (I can't describe it, it's like a virus gone mad, pointer going all over, things popping up, kind of like one of those simulated action scenes in a program run at double or triple speed). I went into Win2000 and downloaded the latest driver for the Intellimouse for NT4 and went back into NT in safe mode and installed the driver. Then it worked (sort of) one time and upon rebooting it was nuts. Then I didn't even have a mouse in NT in safe mode! I had to switch out the mouse with a generic PS/2 mouse. So, I decided to flash the Promise BIOS and see if things are better. The Intellimouse drivers are crazy. It's an exe and when you run it, it creates an installation set of directories under \Program Files by default. In the top level directory there are two things - Setup.exe and \Mouse. Setup.exe didn't do anything. I looked in \Mouse and there's a setup.exe in there and an ipsetup.inf and a directory - \Setup. In this \Setup directory there's an oemsetup.exe and a couple of other exe's and 3 more directories which all have subdirectories of their own mostly with directory trees under them. Of course, it is a little hard to deal with this when you have no mouse.