Monday, July 05, 2004
What to expect from XP Service Pack 2
Some journalists actually do the work of running a product and think about what they're seeing. Scot Finnie is one of them. He recently reviewed an almost-but-not-quite-done version of Microsoft's next big patch for Windows XP. He aimed the review at corporate users, though, so I'll talk about what you'll see as a home or small business user.
Things you will notice
Some web sites you use may work strangely or not at all. This is good. In plain English, Microsoft changed Internet Explorer to make it less trusting. Web sites you visit will have less control over your computer. Most web sites should keep working just fine. A few fancy ones may break. The operators of those web sites ought to fix them.
Your computer may surprise you with how long it takes to shut down. When that happens it's probably not a bug. Windows may seize the opportunity to download new security fixes.
Downloads may go faster for security updates.
Your computer will start nagging you if your firewall or antivirus software is outdated.
IT people at your company will complain about SP2 and call it names. They'll have reasons but none will be relevant to you. Go ahead and install SP2 at home.
Things you won't notice that are important
The firewall is better and it's on all the time. It's your friend so you may want to get acquainted with it. Once you install Service Pack 2, look around the Firewall Control Panel without changing anything to give yourself an idea of what it can do.
You may not notice that there's a new thing in the Internet Control Panel called "Add-On Manager". It lets you turn on and turn off extra programs that web sites add on to Internet Explorer. I recommend leaving the settings there unchanged unless someone you have reason to trust says otherwise.
The new version of Internet Explorer blocks popup ads, just like Firefox already does.
Spyware will still get through. It may need to trick you into installing software by hand, instead of taking over automatically. SP2 closes some holes through which bad people were installing spyware if you only visited their site. That got called "driveby downloading".
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Things you will notice
Some web sites you use may work strangely or not at all. This is good. In plain English, Microsoft changed Internet Explorer to make it less trusting. Web sites you visit will have less control over your computer. Most web sites should keep working just fine. A few fancy ones may break. The operators of those web sites ought to fix them.
Your computer may surprise you with how long it takes to shut down. When that happens it's probably not a bug. Windows may seize the opportunity to download new security fixes.
Downloads may go faster for security updates.
Your computer will start nagging you if your firewall or antivirus software is outdated.
IT people at your company will complain about SP2 and call it names. They'll have reasons but none will be relevant to you. Go ahead and install SP2 at home.
Things you won't notice that are important
The firewall is better and it's on all the time. It's your friend so you may want to get acquainted with it. Once you install Service Pack 2, look around the Firewall Control Panel without changing anything to give yourself an idea of what it can do.
You may not notice that there's a new thing in the Internet Control Panel called "Add-On Manager". It lets you turn on and turn off extra programs that web sites add on to Internet Explorer. I recommend leaving the settings there unchanged unless someone you have reason to trust says otherwise.
The new version of Internet Explorer blocks popup ads, just like Firefox already does.
Spyware will still get through. It may need to trick you into installing software by hand, instead of taking over automatically. SP2 closes some holes through which bad people were installing spyware if you only visited their site. That got called "driveby downloading".
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