Yep, SP2 is a big upgrade. It’s worth it–particularly for Tablet users–but there’s no doubt that it’s going to generate tons of support costs and confusion for end users.
Some of the confusion is over the unknowns. Actually, the most common question I’ve gotten from friends over the last week or so is why they haven’t been able to get the service pack–which is “available” for Windows XP Home users now and soon Windows XP Professional owners via automatic download from within Windows.
From press reports, evidently the service pack download pipe is being tightly controlled so even if you follow the instructions to enable automatic downloads, nothing happens. What’s happening is that people are dabbling with their settings trying to figure out if they don’t have something set right or if the download has actually occurred. This could lead to a nightmare of misunderstandings and missteps.
I can appreciate the phenomenal volume of eager SP2 downloaders out there, but this is messy. I was expecting a big SP2 splash educating everyone on its value with customer support help ready for all. But with the throttled rollout and the concerns of large enterprises over deployments it looks like SP2 may become an evolving event.
This may be the last all-on-one rollout for a long time. Unfortunately, along the way, the top-of-the-line Tablet features embedded in SP2 get lost and dribble out.
Fortunately, this is only temporary. Eventually, everyone will figure out the processes for deploying SP2 that make the most sense and things will settle down and the press will move on to other issues.
In the meantime, I can’t wait for my friends to get a chance at SP2. I’ve been using a beta in one form or another for about six months and I can’t imagine Windows or my Tablet PC without them.
One good sign is that of all the developers I know that have an MSDN subscription and have installed SP2, not a single one has run across a single problem and I haven’t heard a single complaint about it, although many were concerned what the implications could be.
Because of the firewall I feel much more confident about connecting to the Internet or on other people’s network. And the pop-up blocker works better than the Google bar’s. With the Google bar I had to have the audio up or I couldn’t tell when I had to use the secret Ctrl sequence to get at content when I really wanted it. Now I can see the infobar pop up at the top of IE. I like that much better.
Unfortunately, it appears that the advertisers are getting more savvy and I’ve encountered a couple sites that have unblocked popped-up content. I hope this is only temporary. And please Microsoft, if you come up with improvements to the blocker, by all means get them out using the update feature. The blocker is extremely useful to me.