John Koziol blogged
back in March that two areas of VFP were a problem with SP2 installed,
and those two problems were only on chips that supported the NX
processing instructions. Well, Intel says
they'll be shipping client machines with those instructions soon. I'd
really like to see some more concrete examples of what kind of code is
going to break, so that I can evaluate the extent of the threat to my
clients, and start to plan work-arounds, if possible.
Taking my own advice, I installed XP on a test machine, so that I could test Windows XP Service Pack Two Release Candidate Two.
Not a screamer, an PII-266 HP Omnibook that was Laura's previous
laptop. The CD turned out to be flaky, so ended up XCOPY32'ing the CD
to disk (it had a Win98SE install on it) and installing from there,
successfully albeit slowly. Where do you want to go today?
Windows Update, of course. A clean install of XP has forty-nine, yes,
49, "Critical Updates and Service Packs" to download. SP1's a mere 54.5
Mb, so I am glad Comcast's download cap has been lifted to 3
Mbps. That's plugging away now, since it must be installed
separately from everything else. Then I can go back and review the
other "Critical Updates" and see what else I'll need to do.
On the bright side, Microsoft is updating their product -- remember
Ashton-Tate that left an entire community hanging for a year and a half
with a dBASE IV that didn't work before shipping 1.1. On the other
hand, it looks like Microsoft shipped swiss cheese. I read recently,
though I can't recall where, that someone tried doing this install with
his machine jacked directly into the Internet, but before he could
install all the patches, the machine was compromised. I can believe
that. This one's been installing for six hours...
UPDATE: After the WIndows XP SP1, install, Windows Update now
claims there are only 18 "Critical Updates and Service Packs" left to
go. I'm going to go straight for XP SP2 RC2 (try saying that three
times fast) and see how many are left after that.
Batten down the hatches, those of you, like me, who support clients out
in the field. Windows Update could be bringing you some surprises, in
the form of tech support headaches. If you haven't beta tested it
already, you might want to get ahead of your customers, who'll be
beta-testing it soon...
