My Errant Mind

With Service Pack 3 for Windows XP set to be released to the public in less than 48 hours on the 29th of April, I’m mulling over a whole lot of decisions.

You would think a new Service Pack would be a good thing on the face of it, right? Generally speaking, that should be the case. It should make your system safer if nothing else.

However, there are some issues to watch out for if you decide to update to Service Pack 3. One that irritates me (and shows how ridiculous things happen with all sorts of software for all sorts of reasons) is the missing address bar for your taskbar. The Department of Justice required MS to remove the ability to put an address bar on the taskbar, which allows you to launch browser windows (and some apps) without launching a browser first.

DOJ seems to think Internet Explorer is still too tightly integrated with the OS. However, as others have pointed out, it is ridiculous—as using it will launch whatever your default browser is, be it Firefox, Opera or any other. I may not upgrade Windows on my box to SP3 over this issue.

Just kidding. Well, actually, I’m not—but there is a better reason not to.

You won’t be able to uninstall Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 after installing SP3.

Read that again.

If you—like many other XP users (many of my clients resemble this)—are still using Internet Explorer 6 because you’ve had unexplainable crashes and bizarre problems visiting certain websites, updating to SP3 will only enrage you—so I suggest don’t do it, or download Firefox or Opera. Besides, the Department of Homeland Security recommended businesses should stop using Internet Explorer quite some time ago due to the security issues with it.

But wait, just like one of those crappy late night commercials, there’s more!

SP3 installs a new .dll file called Wlanapi.dll, and which some wireless networking devices use. That means if you’re using wireless networking, you want to check beforehand for that .dll on your XP system. If it is there, SP3 will overwrite it for you conveniently so that your third party networking device produces errors of the worst kind. Translated, your “network fall down, go boom.”

So, over the course of the next two days, I am going to be reviewing the SP3 particulars and trying to decide what I’m going to suggest to my biggest client with regards to their multiple networks. Which is why I have been up all night and am awake at 5 AM in the morning on a Sunday. Just what I needed, another MS generated headache.

As if I haven’t had enough already.

Still, I shouldn’t complain. Windows systems were just getting smoothed out and operators were settling in and the bugs and quirks all figured out…work was slowing down. Should I be angry that work will probably pick up some thanks to another problematic MS product release?

One of these days, I’m going to be able to say, “Sorry, I don’t work on Windows systems anymore.” If all goes well, it will be within the next year. What a joyous day it will be, too…