More XP service pack problems surface
May 21, 2008 by Valerie HelmbreckPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Software
Woe is Microsoft. The software company’s latest service pack for Windows XP (dubbed SP3) appears to be causing even more problems.
Users report that after installing SP3, their Windows’ Device Manager is emptied and their network connections are deleted. There were reports that users found their network cards and previously-crafted connections simply had vanished once the service pack ran.
Some thought that Symantec software was somehow connected to the difficulties, but officials from that company said they’d found nothing to link their products to the trouble.
Microsoft’s been mum about the situation except for some generic advice to Windows XP users that they can contact Microsoft support for help.
This is just the latest round of glitches in the release of this latest XP upgrade. When SP3 was first released, it had to be pulled back because of compatibility issues. When it was re-released, users of some systems with AMD processors found their systems locked into an endless reboot cycle.
The cluster of foul-ups leaves many Microsoft XP users wondering: Could Vista really be worse?
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May 27th, 2008 at 11:42 am
I updated from a fully-patched Windows XP Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 3 in 35 minutes on one PC, and 43 minutes on another, directly from the Microsoft Update website. NO PROBLEMS whatsoever were encountered, and each PC ran 5-10% FASTER afterwards! I would never adopt resource-hog Vista, as long as XP is working so well.
May 27th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I have also rolled out the XP SP3 to 16 of my Intel dual core workstations and have had no problems at all. I also have three Vista machines here and really don’t see any of the problems people are talking about. The only Vista related issues were the short learning curves involved as with any new operating system. All are on a MS network with a domain. I just don’t see all the hype about MS and it’s so called problems. Just lucky?
May 27th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Check out this article: http://techtalk.pcpitstop.com/2008/05/14/windows-xp-sp3-has-problems/ esp. if you have an HP AMD desktop computer.
I think I will avoid it for now.
Karen : )
May 27th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I installed SP3 to my Intel Dell PC and had the same reboot problems others talked about on AMD processors. My computer closed all my open programs and just rebooted itsleft for the first two days after the install. Next day after some automatic updates loaded it was fine. No performance improvements though; even seemed slower at times until I upgraded my RAM from 512MB to 2GB.
My company decided to pull back the update until Microsoft can sort out the issues.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:57 am
I’ve loaded SP3 on every PC we own – a Dell laptop, an HP with an Intel dual core CPU, an eMachine with an AMD athlon, and even an 8 yr old HP Pavilion with a Celeron 600 – and have had no problems with any of them. I had more problems upgrading the Celeron machine from Win98 to XP after the original hard drive crashed and I attempted to do a clean install without first reloading 98; apparently the setup process in the XP upgrade had issues with creating/formatting a partition on the new drive because it kept giving me an error message about being unable to copy files. Solved that by booting from the eMac restore CD, exiting to a prompt and using FDISK to create and format an NTFS partition. After rebooting the XP install CD, it worked fine until I had to provide proof of eligibility for an upgrade – at which point I had to scramble to find suitable media for the upgrade, since 98 came preloaded and the only disk I had was the HP restore CD – and the upgrade wouldn’t recognize it. Thought I was stuck because all the other software I had saved over the years was on 3.5″ floppies – and the XP disk wanted the “upgrade eligible” media in the CD drive and wouldn’t even check the floppy. Luckily, I finally found an old NT 3.51 workstation CD and used that – from that point on, the install was seamless. Got it installed, updated to SP3, and it’s running fine, albeit a little slow with only 192MB of RAM – but fine for my 5 & 3 yr olds to play their games on.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:27 am
As an IT professional and consultant, I have deployed numerous SP3 updates and with the exception of one user who had an inferior NIC, I have seen NO problems since SP3 was released.
I have however seen numerous problems with Vista on all builds. Can Vista really be worse? In a nutshell? Hands down YES. I have been running Vista since it came out and not a day goes by that I don’t regret that I switched my primary system to Vista. I know the days are numbered for that day I take the time to back up my data and roll back to XP.