After several delays, Microsoft have finally released Windows XP Service Pack 2. As always, they encourage all users to upgrade - preferably by using Windows Update, which according to the official SP2 download page, should be available 'soon'. The network (full) version is available for download now, weighing in at around 280mb. Microsoft have explicitly not given permission to mirror this and as a result, we don't have a local mirror for it. This shouldn't matter as Microsoft's downloading service is blisteringly fast anyway, but the guys at Downhill Battle are making it available via BitTorrent as well.

If you (are crazy/silly/brave enough to) download XP SP2 from a non-Microsoft source, make sure you check its validity by checking the md5sum, which is:

59a98f181fe383907e520a391d75b5a7

dialup is my friend

dont worry one of my mates installed it last night and stuffed his computer

Was anyone game enough to install this yet? I might wait a few more days and watch the Bugtraq mailinglist before I install it.

But if you already installed it please give us a feedback, thanks ;)

dont worry one of my mates installed it last night and stuffed his computer

I think i'll wait for a few more credible sources then 'your mate' before I decide to 'upgrade' or not :p

I slipstreamed SP2 into my Windows XP install CD. No problems, if anything IE is faster and more reliable. The firewall is very similar to your normal firewalls which block anything trying to access internet etc until you allow it.

I am happy so far.

Well my mate installed it and his monitor exploded right in his face! He was running a cracked version of XP, and now he has cathode ray tubes embedded into his eyelids.

SO BE CAREFUL AND WEAR GOGGLES IF YOU CHOOSE TO INSTALL!

ps. torrents rool.

the service pack2 betas' worked fine for me so unless they've fuked something up since rc2? just make a restore point if your so worried about it.

im due for a format anyway, so if it doesnt work then ive gotta pull my finger out and reinstall.

last edited by Fuknukle at 11:17:25 10/Aug/04

Interestingly, this installed fine on my home system, yet installing the same .EXE on my work machine resulted in XP refusing to boot to the GUI afterwards.

I did a full, fresh format-n-reinstall, thinking it was perhaps a one-off. Nope - still breaks it's booting ability.

Is "slipstreaming" a simple matter of overwriting the files in the \I386\ folder on the XP cd? I'd be willing to give that a go...

Is "slipstreaming" a simple matter of overwriting the files in the \I386\ folder on the XP cd? I'd be willing to give that a go...

go here
it shows how to slipstream SP1a to win xp....SP2 should be no different.

last edited by Irhabi at 11:48:39 10/Aug/04

worked fine on mine

appears to be fine... IE seems a bit quicker and there is this security centre thing with "auto update, firewall and antivirus" integration

IBM have apparently sent an internal memo telling employees not to upgrade to Service pack 2 as yet.

SP2 for Windows XP is more than the usual roll-up of bug fixes and updates. Microsoft has made something of a trade-off, focusing on security at the expense of compatibility. As a result, SP2 can render existing applications inoperable. Microsoft has urged developers and IT professionals to test the update.

I think i'll wait for a fresh install before hitting it.

any idea which applications it will render inoperable? because if its not ones that I use then HOORAH :p unless its like browsers, eg it fux firebird up simply because it can :(

I especially like the bit below the download:

DO NOT CLICK DOWNLOAD IF YOU ARE UPDATING JUST ONE COMPUTER: A smaller, more appropriate download will be available soon on Windows Update.

I've read around that place that SP2 will not be available for download for regular users (unless you want to download a 280MB POS installer with all the crap in the world you don't need) for up to a week more...which doesn't sound cool. When SP2 is released to the general public via Windows Update it should be much smaller than this.

nah firefox works great as usuall :)

edit:
the reason for that Twisted is that windows update checks what you need and what you dont, therefore only downloading s*** you DO need.

so it doesnt download all the updates since sp1 if you already have them, and checks for 'new certified' drivers for components you have installed.

last edited by Fuknukle at 13:24:05 10/Aug/04

Installed on a few testbeds here at work, not bad, it only broke Symantec Anti Virus Corporate Edition's ability to push an update to the client but Symantec have said they are working on it. The firewall features are quite good, especially the ability to filter based on which Network Connection you are using, including VPN's.

I was somewhat impressed (god I nearly choked on that :)... ) that it Identified AVG personal on my machine at home as the Anti Virus client, also the WiFi replacement for WLan Utility seems to load quicker than the its 3rd party counterpart.

Nothing broke, but a few thing required the Firewall to be modified to work, which has been covered in great detail.

EDIT: MSDN version weighs in at a tad under 400MB.

last edited by GumbyNoTalent at 13:35:11 10/Aug/04

If someone notices when its available on WindowsUpdate, please post here :)

worked fine fdr me, for some reason i gained 400 meg on my windows drive also...

Thanks tiny, yes it was just the ability to push definitions to the client.

before sp2: 20.1
after sp2: 20.3

SP2 limits the number of tcp connections to ten. This wull foobar such p2p programs as bit torrent. (and other les legitimate ones :D)

So if you use such programs there is a registry hack to fix this problem. Youll have to search it yourself because I dont have it on hand.

oh yes and for anyone with a corporate edition of windows xp(like myself) id wait even a week after sp2 is released as apparently there going to be shutting down any pirated corporate editions...oh yeh thats if u do have a dodge copy..and that'd be naughty.

a mate of a mate of a mate of a guy i met once on the train said he installed it today and had no problems.. aslong as the key is right you're a-ok, Fckgw is not a valid key monkeys...

apparently there going to be shutting down any pirated corporate editions..

thats what they said about sp1..

originally they WERE going to go further with sp2 but all they did was block another ten corporate keys.

anyone remmeber when microsoft said 'if they're going to pirate software, we'd rather it was ours'

no Fuknukle i dont, care to remind me?

Ive been using sp2 since it was leeked a few days before official release and i dont have any programs that are broken because of it. Yes ive had to setup firewall rules or turn FW off altogether ect but in the end its finally got the user end options to cater for the spam and bs we receive on an hourly basis. Congrats MS.

well just installed it and the firewall is s***.

i have it enabled and everything can access the internet and it doesnt even ask if i want to block the program.

i ran ET, yahoo messenger, msn messenger, COGS, Outlook....it only asked me if i want to allow ET and yahoo messenger access after they were alread acessing the internet...in other words it didnt block them.
the rest didnt even trigger a reaction from the firewall....

so dont use it!

no Fuknukle i dont, care to remind me?

I believe he said it in relation to piracy rates in China/Asia. If I remember correctly, he also went on to say that they'll figure out how to make them pay for it eventually.

Ive been using sp2 since it was leeked a few days

It was turned into a smelly vegetable?!

i installed the beta release, worked good for the wireless bit.

i just installed it, found the firewall to be ass, so its now disabled...

haven't run into any other probs yet

well I just installed it, because I can. First thing I did was disable that stupid security center bulls***, and turn off the firewall. I've got kerio personal firewall and a smoothwall router, I don't need windows' firewall as well.

One thing I've noticed is some "details" tab in every properties page in device manager, looks technical :)

im due for a format anyway, so if it doesnt work then ive gotta pull my finger out and reinstall.

http://afk.sagamers.com/windowsreinstall.png

Frankly, Microsoft are getting too personal for my liking.

If you have picked up that XPPro+SP2 iso then DO NOT USE IT. It doesn't accept your normal XP Pro key as it is a seperate product (DAMN YOU MICROSOFT).

If you have access to pipe for free, then try ftp.[your city].pipenetworks.com as they have it under download\patches.

So can I report PIPE for piracy

> To report a website offering unlicensed copies of Windows XP SP2 for download, please send e-mail to: piracy@microsoft.com

They are not offering an unlicensed copy of Windows XP SP2, they have Service Pack 2 for Windows XP.

I assume that Microsoft warning is also referring to the Service Pack itself, which is unable to be legally mirrored without Microsoft's explicit permission.

edit: Wild Wizard, where did you see that line ?
edit#2: n/m, found it; its on the (updated) download page referred to in the first post of this thread.

last edited by trog at 13:34:19 11/Aug/04

:(

I installed it on my system and rebooted, it gave me the option to turn on automatic updates etc, then I logged on and it came up with my wallpaper and a popup window that I've never seen before.

'Windows has stopped explorer.exe from loading to protect your computer'

It also said something about 'NoExecute' which is something that works with the AMD64's in this service pack I've heard.

I got task manager up and tried to start explorer but would get the same error and then it would give the same error for taskmanager and close that too...

So I just had to reboot into safe mode and uninstall it. Must be some incompatibility in software cos I have a lot of crap on here atm. I think I'll just slipstream it into a bootable cd and install it next time I format.

Also when I uninstalled it it took my Catalyst drivers with it so I had to reinstall them. :(

any one else had a similar prob?

my specs are:

amd64 3000+
radeon 9800 pro
1gig ram
win xp pro (legit of course)

Oh that's right, Microsoft doesn't let anyone else distribute their patches... Forgot about that.

I have installed it and had no problems at all. Closest thing to a problem would be that box that comes up telling you to turn your anti-virus on rekkons my virus definitions from yesterday are out of date even though they are the most recent ones :P But so far its been smooth sailing. Nero when i loaded it up popped up a box saying that it might have trouble running with SP2 but everything i tried in nero still worked fine.

The issue with p2p apps and XP XP2.

This thread at Broadband forums outlines the issue and fix. Microsoft is deliberately limiting the ability to start new 'random' TCP connections to stop worms spreading quickly. Once a process has more than 10 half-open 'random' TCP connections it queues new ones instead of openning them.

This affects p2p apps like emule (?) and bittorrent and there is not an easy way to fix it.

You will find the following message in your event log when your p2p process is capped: Event ID 4226 - TCPIP

Changing the registry setting microsoft mentions here doesn't fix the problem like you would expect (people suggested setting TcpNumConnections to something greater than 10). This doesn't work.

you need to patch tcpip.sys. To do this you need lvllord's patcher. It must be at least version 2.0b. Version 2.0a does not do the final version of SP2.

I'm making no guarantees cept that it worked for a mate and he's no longer getting those event log errors, and that you need to get passe windows file protection (it asks you if you want to keep the modified version or not). Use at your own risk. YMMV.

oh yeah, it requires a reboot.

last edited by natslovR at 16:59:06 11/Aug/04

what would the world be like if windows was in linux's position and vice versa...

i just tried to play an avi file with divx player... no go chucked some error...

tried a whole bunch of other avi files, also chucked the error...


anyone experiencing this too?

Its running fine on my pc so far.. no problems at all, very happy =)

errr lol when i go to the directory with all my avi's in them it wont appear in the open file window, even with *all files selected...

dragged the file into the player window and it worked... how bizzare!

Downhill Battle have been hit with a takedown notice: http://sp2torrent.com/index.php

hahahah, the land of the free and you can't post a link to a hash of a file that's distributed for free by the copyright owner.

^^^ probably to avoid noob attacks where people embed malice code.

i installed it a few weeks ago. love it. ive been having trouble syncing my phone with a blekin bluetooth dongle.

last night i unblocked the usb dongle, and moved it to the usb ports at the back. windows picked it up as a new device and set it up.

so i removed the belkin bluetooth software and tried syncing it. worked first go! also, allowed me to surf the web on my phone via the bluetooth connection the pc.

wd ms!

How the hell do you get this to install from the updates page..it tells me it can only be done via having auto update activated, which I have done, yet it wont update at the allocated time?

grrrr

Psycho; I read something somewhere today that the magic update thing won't be activated for the masses until tomorrow. Its weird though; blahnana got the auto-update prompt and is all up to date already, but neither of my 2 XP machines will update.

cheers trog.

I've just installed SR2 via Automatic Update and everything's working fine (tcpip.sys patched).
I'm impressed that it starts Windows with a security settings screen asking how you want your firewall, anti-virus, etc set up. I was expecting it to go changing a whole lot of setting that were going to be a nightmare to track down. MS seems to have got this one right (fingers crossed).

Afterthought: Oh man the pop-up blocker is sweet.

I finally got the prompt asking me if I want to download it; clicked download... nothing has happened yet!

Yer when it prompts saying blocked dl i find it takes a while to download the thing, that and sometimes when i go to some sites that need active x i click the drop down to try install it and freezes IE..

neway format coming up so hopefully it will fix it, might just not bother with norton net security and just run the windows firewall and my router wall

I tried norton internet security 2004 the other day, I uninstalled it within about 3 minutes of installing it.

hah sif norton

chuggs to much
and to fukin annoying cant just exit out of it for those tough games only disable. and generally gay

Well this d/laod went nice a smoothly. Upon restart it didnt like trying to load the Sony Image transfer program that was in the start up in msconfig. Just disabled it and it runs fine once inside the OS, XP just spit an error trying to load it during startup. Everything else I have tried so far works fine, and am I right is thinking that IE now seems to run just as fast, if not faster than Firefox?

All in all seems like a pretty good update so far...

Perhaps a shade faster, but I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't mentioned. I feel like overall bootup time is quicker though.

Dunno if this has been posted already but you can order SP2 free of charge
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

last edited by g0t bea[n] at 09:51:41 28/Aug/04

I finally got the prompt asking me if I want to download it; clicked download... nothing has happened yet!

yeah I got the prompt on the laptop, it took longer to install the wupd version than it would have taken to download the network install and just double click it. So that's what I did on my other desktop, took half as long as wupd.
gg

g0t_bea[n]: that would involve people telling MS their home address, or PO box. I think most people here would choose not to do that :p

last edited by WhoopAss at 18:46:09 28/Aug/04

I've had a couple of problems with SP2 nothing major in the end but waisted hours of my time to work them out.
The first was after downloading from Windows/installing and doing its reboot,it was just about to run desktop and a blue screen message flashed up and the computer rebooted and kept doing it in a loop.
Well safe mode got me to desktop and to cut a long story short I uninstall Zone Alarm and the computer would boot in normal mode.

The second was Quake3 was crashing to desktop or game menu after a few minutes of play.
When I had a look at the "Data Execution prevention "feature in SP2(controlpanel/system/advanced/performance settings)and changed the setting from "for essentual windows programs" to "for all prorams" Quake3 crashed after the load screen at the very start.
Reinstalling the game without the "nocd all versions"(turns out you don't need one anyway with the newest patch,Da)the game runs fine on either DEP setting.
Something to look out for if your CPU supports this feature (Athlon64).

Has anyone NOT got this yet via auto-update?

I'm deliberately not forcing the update just to see if the auto-update is ever going to work. On my main PC, I've gotten a 'new updates are available' balloon in the system tray, which then offers a download button. As soon as I press that the window vanishes, as does the Windows Update icon in the systray.

Days later, still nothing has happened, which seems to indicate a failure. c:\windows\windowsupdate.log doesn't indicate any CLEAR errors, but quite obviously nothing is happening.

If I go to the 'Automatic Updates' tab (right click my computer, properties) and turn off automatic updates, hit apply, then turn them back on, I get the balloon again telling me updates are available - but if I hit download, the process repeats - nothing happens. (This is what it did yesterday - now its not even giving me the balloon).

I'm guessing that its just something like all the download servers used for auto-updating are busy feeding off to all the other people who are auto-updating. Manually updating my laptop worked fine, but this just seems really odd.

Trog the same thing is happening with me. I get the automatic update and once i click to download it says it's 0% completed but nothing really happens over a few days. Now i've just completely ignored it.

Didn't microsoft say that they are not going to force it on everyone? Originally they were going to but they don't want to take all that heat from 'breaking' all those PCs even though they consider SP2 to be critical.