Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
Poor Windows XP gets no attention at all any more. The big news this week has been the formal announcement of Windows Vista SP1. But Windows XP will get a service pack, too – SP3. However, it’ll just be a boring rollup of all the fixes since SP2, meaning all you’ll be getting is a new “baseline” to start from. If you install a Windows XP system, or if an OEM builds one, it’ll be SP3 instead of SP2.
We Say: In a way, this is nice because they’ll be no more downloading of patches, or using Autopatcher – oh, wait, we can’t do that any longer, either.
shame…corporate stupidity at its finest. Autopathcher was a Godsend. MS has lost the recipe.
oh well…
I say, if it gets rid of the hundreds of update folders and log files in the Windows folder, it’s well worth it and is a really good thing. Not sure why you refer to it as a “boring rollup”. What else could it BE?
This could be helpful. The real question is how much does Ballmer think a OS he’s killing off is worth.
As soon as a new OS is out Microsoft should have a new EULA. This new End User License Agreement should state that the OS is a Subscription and that once the next version is out ie Vista Service Pack 1 then they will have to renew their Supscription to the OS or face having thir HArd Drive reformated automatically from the OS itself and all data destroyed!
That’s *all* you get? After seeing the travesty that is Vista, a nice clean baseline of XP that doesn’t require half a day of windows update hell is worth looking forward to, IMO. At least we can be confident they didn’t pile in additional broken features that no-one asked for.