update paranoia

its still only 7.30 am here. i am just on my second cup of coffee. the birds are singing, the sun is shining. we are about to sod off around the island till Mon night. four days of sleeping in the open. listening to the surf, and watching the stars. (i don't know what faze the moon is in). anyway I've just noticed the little icon saying 'new update ready to install' and paralysis has hit me. i don't know whether to install it now, knowing I'm not going to know if and what problems that brings, or wait till Tues. so i can access the support here if anything goes wrong. anybody would think it was a time bomb i was installing, not a simple (!) update. so the first advice i get in the next half hour is what i will go with. to install or not to install........that is the question.
aloha

 

sounds like SP2. If you don't fancy troubleshooting, then I'd wait

 

Definitely wait. You're not going to be there in the interim anyway, and the SP2 update will take a fair amount of time even if all goes well and you've got a high speed connection. Go enjoy your weekend.

 

thanks guys. i just needed to be told what to do. . ill try and capture the dolfins this time. have a good weekend yourselves. much aloha

 

or . . . you could do like I finally after much anguished dithering decided to do . . . just tell the darn thing to download and be damned. Heck, we're all geeks here. We'll just cope with whatever happens. It'll be fun -- no, really, fun. I think! I know! I hope. Awwww . . . HECK! They're coming to take me AWAY! HaHaHeeHeeHoHo!!!

 

here's an interesting read: http://theinquirer.net/?article=17985

even though that sp2 won't go as badly or very well is higher than "normal" here (due to the high volume of geeks), it's a tough task for the not-so-knowledgeable or the lazy (like I) to install sp2. My opinion on sp2: the delayedness has a reason, and I was hoping MS would delay it just a bit further to do some extra troubleshooting. I'd rather wait a month for it to have many problems fixed over having it now messing up my system (which it did!)

 

A couple of observations: It says "new update ready to install"? That means it's already downloaded. Why is it being assumed it's SP2? If you click the icon and press the Details button, you can see exactly what is "ready to install".

 

No argument that SP2 is worth doing. Laurie's question was whether or not to dive in just before having to leave for the weekend. Since the update takes a while, and MAY need some app tweaking afterwords, it makes sense NOT to dive into it when she doesn't have time to nurse it. Same would be true if you were working on a major project for work with a close deadline... put it off 'til after the urgent stuff is done. And if I were stuck with and/or dependent on Norton, I'd likely hang back a bit in hopes that Norton gets a fix out.

On my system, SP2 "broke" Nero 6, and downloading all the latest updates for Nero (which fixed it) was almost 100 megabyte download. Even with DSL, the SP2 update kept me entertained for most of an evening.

Lets say I had a project for work that HAD to be done and burned to disk and delivered to the boss on Monday, and I was on dial-up. I'd be in deep crap Monday morning if I needed the weekend to finish the project, then decided to install SP2 Sunday evening BEFORE burning the results to disk.

 

I bet those numbers were similar when SP1 came out.

Lets not dismiss the human factor here.

The average user's machine is clogged with spyware and half the time viruses, they do not shut down properly, and they can't be bothered to keep up to date on anything.

Is there any shock that there are problems?

Not to me.

Back on topic, I would agree to wait. Do it when you have nothing better to do. Don't waste, or possibly ruin your weekend on it.

 

yes, i am aware of that. I was just hoping that the acceptance rate would be well over 50% if they spent just ONE extra month on it, or better yet, get some more all around beta testers. I'm sure most of the "failures" came around from software incompatibilites, but my installation and a few of my friends' installations went haywire not from software incompatibilities, but from bugginess of the software, which leads me to believe that ms should do something about their beta testers.

 

for me, with no 3rd party software interaction, got a decent installation where explorer seems to have a cold or something. my friend's windows installation just went kaplut. another's had his computer slowed down a little. not enough to call it a bug, i guess, but it was slow enough as it is, so he's not calling it a success.

hehe, i guess it's like me and asus boards, eh? (btw, my success rate with asus boards is 20-25%. i was just unlucky.)

 

well that explains why my pc was slower than normal this morning - SP2 was done installing. not a single hiccup so far - on a MSI mobo btw.
both pc's with MSI mobo's have SP2 loaded now, the pc with Asus mobo hasn't yet, cause windows xp needs activation ( legal for a change, but ms says it's already in use )