Tuesday, November 30, 2004

XP SP2 and the SBS Diva

Susan the self styled SBS "Diva" is a Microsoft MVP.
She has been commenting on my previous entries about XP SP2 Installation and the Microsoft Action Pack.
She then wrote an article about installing XP SP2 addressed to me!

A number of emails have also gone back and forth and from these and the article I have plucked these gems.

98 is a joke dear and should be killed off.
I haven't BSOD'd an XP. (Blue Screen of Death)
Okay so maybe I'm a major control freak, but knowing that I can remotely patch, touch and control all my workstations just makes my day.
The only pain I had in upgrading to SP2 was two workstations that had digital video cards from nvidia. That's Nvidia not Windows at fault.


First my response is to thank Susan for the effort she is showing to help me and others get more secure, and the effort MS 'appears' to be making also.
My second and more lenghty response however is not a criticism of Susan but of a corporation that has created a monster.
The Windows OS family is widely recognised as being a major security disaster. MS is constantly filling in holes in the millions of lines of code and to be fair to them it is probably being developed faster than they can repair it. So the easy answer is to create a new version. This is 'head in the sand' mentality.

Susan the following anecdotal material is intended not as a whinge, but as constructive feedback from someone who makes a living using Microsoft products, and for that he is thankful, but who is constantly frustrated by those same products as will be seen below.

BSOD and system (in?)stability.
Dont's start me on BSOD - I had one PC the other night freeze (not an uncommon thing for XP. After restarting it went into a vxd blue screen restart cycle. After 4 attempts I gave up and went to bed.
In the morning I started it in safe mode and it started fine. I then restarted in normally and it is running fine. No I haven't flashed the bios with the latest firmware and yes the machine is over 3 years old. But it should still work. I don't know many people who would a) recognise a vxd error if they saw one, b) know how to start a machine in safe mode or c) flash the bios. For comparison 1 of my Linux servers is running on a Pentium 1 and the only problem I have ever had with it was a faulty system board battery. It has never had a bios flash upgrade, and it has never frozen or crashed once in the 2 years it has been running. My main server is a P4 and it has similar stability. By comparison out of 6 PC's I would see a BSOD once per 3 months each and crashes and sudden restarts probably once every couple of weeks (depending on how frequently they are used).

I am fairly proficient at building and maintaining computers of all makes shapes and sizes and regularly rebuild or upgrade pcs for friends, relatives etc. Most of them have no clue, and neither does most of the civilian population.

So while you and I can converse on roughly the same level regarding firewalls, blocking ports and levels of security most consumers (and I include my business clients here also) have no idea what the heck we are talking about.

Most people I know outside of computers haven't even heard of XP SP2, let alone know why they should upgrade. I am just happy to come back to their PC 6 months after cleaning it for them to see that they are still updating their virus signatures and regularly running Adaware. I saw a bloke today (brand new blog I helped him create) who I set up Adaware for 6 months ago - he has had IE infected with popups, and start page overrides. He is barely technologically aware. He has however been running Adaware faithfully but it doesn't get everything. I am going to shift him to Firefox because it is easier to manage security - simple truth - if it gets corrupted you can uninstall it and reinstall it - you can't do that with IE and he doesn't have the know how to even understand the registry let alone how to go about finding start page entries.

I guess you work for Microsoft. So you have probably got a good PC with plenty of RAM, techs available if you need help - great software, you probably upgrade PC's regularly and I guess you can fairly easily shift data and personal settings across. You understand the architecture of the operating system, how MS stores user settings and other data in weird and wonderful places (and then forgets to remove it when the programs are uninstalled!)

Most users I come across have no idea that important data used by their applications are stored in hidden files and folders. They may faithfully save their docs etc onto a cd or some other backup but when the time comes for a system upgrade or an OS upgrade it has traditionally been so painful (and for many 95 and 98 are recent memories not far distant and for a few still their current OS) that they don't want to upgrade again. I can't convince my parents to upgrade from Win 98 and they are on the internet unfirewalled. They do have a virus scanner but that's it. At least they are dialup so their exposure is limited.

Microsoft's biggest problem is itself. By constantly pushing out new versions and trying to force people into an upgrade path they have created a rod for their own back.

This has been obvious in the corporate market. Most of my major corporate clients (1000 seats plus) are happily staying on Office 2000 and either Windows 2000 or XP as client os. They are not planning on upgrading and in some cases are still rolling out XP and office 2000) I am talking major government departments and private enterprises.

As well as concentrating on new and better things Microsoft should focus on its existing core applications. Its OS and Office products. In my opinion it needs to make its existing applications work properly for 90% of people. Fix forward and backward compatability issues (especially with Word and Excel). Fix the security issues that people like Steve Gibson constantly raise. Get the OS stable and no more BSOD and I will be happier!

I hope this information can be passed on. I have consulted with a number of other people (both technical and non technical) as I write this fairly lengthy response.

The technical ones agreed with me completely, the non technical had no idea what I was talking about.
Thats the point I am trying to make!



Posted by: Jethro | 9:15 PM |