Maybe it's best to ask MS to send you the whole megillah on CD (which they do for free).

I did and it only took 2 weeks to arrive in Darkest Africa.........wedged in a cleft stick :cool:

Can anyone confirm whether this is true?

I have been declining SP2, but in the last couple of days I have been offered (and have accepted) "Security Update for Windows XP" (KB833987) and "Update for Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)" (KB883357) through the Windows automatic updater.

I'd be unhappy to be forced to take SP2 at this stage merely to keep all the other bugs out of XP as and when they're published.

Pprunepop, for a while my machine took longer to load, especially the icons on the desktop, but after a few start-up cycles it seemed to sort itself out. Ditto Office programs - they were slow to load, but soon returned to normal. I've read somewhere that XP has inbuilt technology to make frequently used files load faster so maybe it needed time after the SP2 update to figure out which files it should shuffle on the disk (or whatever it does :confused: )

Dunno about the shutdowns:(

AA

Thanks for that ausatco, lo and behold this morning the icons re-drew better and the whole startup was a little better. I reckon you have a point so I will put off my un-installation.

PPP

I have had it installed for a few weeks now, as others said a little slow at first while it sorts itself out, but now GREAT......... :ok:

Just make sure you are set to be notified of any updates, and instal them.

I installed XP Home(SP1) from an OEM disc 2 weeks ago on a new build computer. Yesterday I tentativly installed SP2 from a disc supplied by Micro$oft.

Suprise, suprise all went well with one minor niggle. XP now tells me that my firewall is not turned on - but it is and working well. I turned off the firewall that came with XP and use Black Ice instead.

As for starting up and shutting down - no problems at all (touching wood). All said and done SP2 seems to be working OK for me.:ok:

CC

Loaded SP2 a couple of weeks ago. Seemed to work well at first. Problem not recognising Sygate firewall.

Main problems concerned functionality of CD and DVD drives.

Decided to remove SP2. Surprisingly easy and ensure update of various programmes such as Spybot etc

Compass Call, you can turn off that nag.

Control Panel, Security Centre (the shield). In the Firewall section, click the Recommendations button. In the Recommendation window that opens, tick the box next to "I have a firewall solution that I'll monitor myself" then OK.

AA

".....Microsoft has responded to customer requests for another extension before Windows XP SP2 is automatically delivered to computers as a critical update.

TechNet Flash readers may recall the August release of an SP2 Blocker tool to help IT pros better manage the update by setting a Windows registry key that instructs the system to skip downloading and installing SP2 for 120 days while still allowing other critical updates. Last week, the Microsoft SP2 team announced that it has doubled that period to 240 days. The blocking mechanism will prevent Automatic Updates and Windows Update from delivering SP2 to Windows-based computers until 12 April 2005."

Blocker tool available at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

For anyone tired of being nagged by the Security Center:

Go into the Security Center. In there click on:

Then just remove the check marks you do not want to be alerted for.

Take Care,

Richard

Just had a call from my son, who, having installed SP2 is now in an endless loop.

He has a Dell Inspirion 2610 laptop, 256 k ram, P4 1.6, and XP home.

Having installed SP2 the machine said it was rebooting, after it had done so it said "unable to find/locate WINSRV"

From this situation the only alternatives he has are to reboot or reset, and doing either only results in a repeat of the above message.

Anyone got any suggestions ?

MS Knowledge Base answer reference WINSRV.

Diver, reference Wavefinder. It is a known issue with no solution. The only way to get it to work is to uninstall SP2, even then most people have had to reformat and reinstall XP. With all the hassle to date with it and XP I doubt if there is anyone working on fixing it.

Thanks Orac, I don't think he is going to be very pleased to hear that.

Just to report that despite declining SP2, I've had a few further automatic updates offered and installed today:- KB numbers KB834707, KB840987, KB873376, KB841356, KB841533 and KB873374. Four of these are said to be security updates for XP, and one is an update to IE6 SP1.

So it looks like MS will still carry on patching XP SP1 if SP2 isn't installed.