Another reason to stay away from SP2 - Page 2

^^Everything and more

I think I'm gonna buy one (probably the latest version) for the wife next time I make it back to the US. Maybe by then their top model will be better than my 3200.

Phantom and Ferrari 3200

There is a bug with Data Prevention Execution (DEP) between the Athlon 64 and SP2.

Microsoft has acknowledged this problem and posted a workaround. Sorry I do not have the link.

Good luck,

I did a fresh install on the new laptop, then updated to SP2, no problems at all, just for your info on a new system. Boot time hasn't changed, and wifi is great, even reconnects itself within 10s of coming out of hibernation/sleep.

That said, I'm not upgrading my old xp machine until it begs me to.

no issues here at all but then again i did reformat first. Also, my boot times actually seem to be faster under sp2 ~22 seconds after all my tweaks as opposed to ~24 under sp1, but that could just be because i got rid of a lot of the crap hp preinstalled on my harddrive lol.

i use microsoft bootvis. It allows you to "trace" your boot ups. I use the time it gives me there - it'll say boot up done in xx.xx seconds

i believe the time it gives is when the desktop is first visible which on my comp is pretty much when i can begin clicking on things.

btw its now at 23 seconds since i installed the printer stuff.

never mind it is 22 seconds till the welcome screen b/c i just timed it from pressing the power button till when everything loads and its more like 35 seconds (including me typing in my password)...still pretty fast compared to my old desktop which takes about 2 minutes to start up.

Holy crap! 4 min 53 sec on windows xp! Yeah, somethings definitely wrong there...even with a lot of startup programs and heavily fragmented hard drive mine still booted up in about 1 minute. Maybe u should just make backups and reformat. i actuallly had a similiar problem on this computer and i had to reformat also: i was screwing around with my drivers and messed something up and had did a "repair install" from the windows cd because it wouldnt boot up at all even in safe mode. After this "repair install" it took like 4 minutes to boot up i think because i did the repair install over sp2 but the install disc had sp1 on it so it became sort of a sp1/sp2 hybrid (which i guess caused it to start up really slow). Anyways, a reformat is probably a good idea. ive already done it 3 times in about a month (dont ask lol).

M8: Are you using the Microsoft bluetooth stack after upgrading to SP2 or are you using the Widcomm stack? I didn't have any problems either in the upgrade but the bluetooth driver was replaced with the Microsoft Generic one and as fas as I have investigate the Microsoft bluetooth software DOES NOT support all the services that the Widcomm one provides, like for example Audio Gateway, headset, file sharing and tranasfer (MS provides only "push").
I am very interested to read your answer. I am trying to have the Widcomm software to work on SP2 because I am needing some of these services. My Dlink USB dongle is working now on SP2 in another machine and it uses Widcomm soft also.

Thank you.

THors...welcome to september! i already forgot this thread existed.

Firstly, SP2 lowers your performance, usually just a bit in benchmarks, nothing really noticable in real life usage, but still, a degradation in performance.
Secondly, slower boot times, which are already mentioned
Thirdly, lots and lots of incompatability issues. Heard lots of horror stories from lots of people about various pieces of software not working, various bits of hardware. For me, my dad's PDA dosnt work with it, my internal USB card reader (jacks into the mobo header) and my Sharp NetMD dosnt work with it. All of them induce system wide crashes. If i have them connected when i boot up, windows just freezes at the boot screen. Friggin annoying. I spyware scan regularly with Spybot S&D and i use Firefox so i hardly pick up any spyware that sticks around for more than 2 days and i scanned before installing SP2, so...

Anyway, u wont see me using SP2 for a looonnngggg time.

My university just announced by email right when the semester was ending that before anyone will be allowed to logon to the network when they return next semester, they will have to install SP2, and re-register their machines on the network, and this little process will also verify that they have SP2 installed. Is anyone besides me seeing a HUGE freaking mess at the beginning of next semester???

I am going to LOATH putting this on my machine. I went through all the services and have running exactly what needs to be. I went through the hundreds of Group Policy Objects in XP and set them for my needs. SP2 adds about, what was it...400+ MORE GPO's? I run clean of virus's and scan for adware daily (security person here) I'm of course going to need to do a "clean" install of XP SP2, if you can call it that... Argh what a huge waste of my time!

I can see the huge mess the univ. network is going to be in when everyone freaks out, doesn't know what is going on, eventually figures out they need an update, then everyone tries to update all at once to SP2, from the MS download site. It's not like everyone's machine is being pointed to a network share or anything to lessen the load on bandwidth. I suppose in the long run it maaayyy help the network by improving machine's security so they're not taken over by virii and used for attacks like I've heard reports of now on our univ's network. And *hopefully* (but probably not) it will help internet speed a little by taming some of the insane uploaders who leave their upload speed on full throttle and choke the network because they either don't care or more likely don't know what they're doing, or what the software on their machine is doing.

Did I mention how much I'm going to HATE doing this to my baby?

...out to look for the best way to integrate widcomm drivers into an SP2 slipstream install...and fix the myriad of other problems in SP2 I'm crying insideadios winter break...hello fixing microsoft beta patch...