Bryan took the plunge the other day and installed Service Pack 2. His verdict so far? No problems. Bryan’s a luddite when it comes to making changes on his computer. He makes a living with his computer so he doesn’t want to spend unnecessary time fixing things that weren’t broken. So he cautiously installed SP2. However, so far he hasn’t run into any problems. I’m not sure if Bryan would have installed SP2 by himself without checking with me or someone else first. I told him I’d been running SP2 beta for awhile and have not run into any show stoppers.
I bet Bryan’s approach to SP2 will be a common one. Some will just dive in and install it. Most will wait for friends and colleagues to let them know how it goes. And others (like many of our parents) will want us to do it for them and then ask us to explain a dozen or more times why this or that dialog appears now and it didn’t before.
From what I’ve experienced SP2 is a hands down winner. The main focus of SP2 is security, however, Tablet PC users will find several refreshing improvements in the new Tablet Input Panel (TIP) and the console for managing wireless connections. These two features are must haves for us Tablet folks.
Microsoft has some great information about SP2 here. From time to time people talk about apps “breaking” so I imagine we’ll see some blogs or tech websites aggregate detailed snippets of precisely what this means and hopefully these sites will migrate to the top of Google quickly. This is one of the first things Bryan wanted to know, for instance.
It’s not just the luddites who won’t install it. Don’t forget the corporate users (especially those with bespoke software) who won’t install for fear of breaking things are can’t install because SP2 DOES in fact break some essential app used by only them.
We had an email round only today saying under NO cirmcumstances to install SP2 and we’re talking about thousands of users who are going to be unprotected.
We may not have much luck with SP2 if we can’t persuade organisations to move away from NT4 – even though it’s no longer supported