Rating for SP2

[CrisCr0ss]

all apps work great, everything is much more stable than before IMO.

[albator]

@soulin

FOr a corporate point of view, I dont disagree with you. But I talk for personnal pc. Those with the power users. Try my method and you will see. For a firewall I use black ice defender.

[Martin Zugec]

Well, for Power Users it is probably better to use something else... But Power Users are minority - most of users are home/corporate users.

[oneless]

After first 10..12 updates , it become a stable OS.

[albator]

@soulin

True, but I am not a normal user.

I am Jeremy follower

[Lost Soul]

well it does fix most security issues

[bledd]

the only people who shouldn't like sp2 are admins of MASSIVE networks which use old decrepid software that they should have replaced but haven't

i voted 'superb'

[suryad]

Though I think SP2 is great and thats what I voted, I think that SP2 is what XP should have been in the first place...my 2 cents

[atomizer]

average...

i've never had a problem with SP2 that i can recall, and it does add a few decent fixes but, on the other hand, a lot more tweaking is necessary after installing it: dissabling/removing the firewall, patching the TCP/IP stack, removing the "security" center (what a joke), etc., etc., etc...

all of the IE changes are useless to me because i use Firefox/Thunderbird. the firewall and security center gets dumped because i use Kerio PF (which blocks trafic during boot and is very fast and configurable).

it's obvious that MS sees it's average user as pretty much computer ignorant and later OS's and service packs reflect that. i like XP a lot -- but not out of the box. a AWFUL LOT of tweaking is necessary to make it sutible for a power user and nLite is the best thing i've ever found, by far, to get rid of all the crap that MS thinks i just can't live without.

when you think about it though, MS OS's, IMO, are not nearly as "point and click" as it's assumed; you really have to be careful what you install or else you'll end up with huge headaches because of the registry and shared DLL's. MS has got to be the number one target for ICC's (incredibly crappy coders)

now, if i can just get rid of the bulk of the registry and stick all programs configs in their program group where they belong

[Maleko]

Installed SP2 on about 30+ machines...no probs at all

Nice addons, and not annoying, you can turn them off!

[Martin Zugec]

Installed SP2 on 1000+ machines - no problems, I am really glad they released it.

2atomizer: same problem again - things that geeks like is not good for professional administrators. Security Center is great, because it is using WMI classes, so they forced security providers to support WMI architecture.

About WFW, it is at least at the same level than products like Kerio. BTW boot time protection is not at the same level as WFW.

About tcpip.sys fix, it is common hoax - it is NOT 10 connections at time, it is 10 connection in wait state... Which is good limit, because it helped a lot to slow spreading viruses.

Also many people criticized limiting raw packets, but it is great - it blocked script kiddies attacks and only disadvantage for slowing down scanning tools like nmap - which is not problem at all, because most administrators have different machines for this purposes.

[army20]

I don't like the information bar.

[sonu27]

If only it improved performance, instead of decreasing it!

[suryad]

Really performance went down? How do you figure Sonu yaar?

[sonu27]

It has been proven online, theres I guide somewhere that shows this. Also a topic on this forum that also shows this.

Do a search you should be able to find it.

I even noticed the speed decrease. Since my PC old.