Less than a quarter of businesses in North America have installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) according to a new study, April 05, 2005 by AssetMetrix.

http://www.scmagazine.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=newsDetails&newsUID=aa4b5e12-d883-4108-b504-222e5d7b4154&newsType=Latest%20News&s=n 

Hey, It's not just me.

Yup - I read that somewhere also!  But since I am not a business, I have upgraded to SP2 - as  a matter of fact I just finished installing SP2 on this machine.

IMHO (and I have been accused of being full of it in the past) - I think some of the bigger corps are just scared by some of the horror stories associated with updates gone wrong and do not want to lose computer time with both the upgrade and the repair.  My other thought would be that perhaps a lot of these "business systems" may not be connected to the internet and thus the corps do not need each and every system updated.

Yeah damnyank,

Proprietary software/hardware is probably an issue too. Say your a small-mid size business, and you have 20 or so computers. Each has some different software or hardware. Deploy via the network and shazaam, nobody can talk to anyone on the network anymore!

I'm not a computer genius, but if SP2 came out in say a "compatability distro," where it would install virtually, then alert you to issues it had with your (fill in the blank) Then you could go out and really be proactive in the deployment of SP2.

Thanks to the mouse click happy, security oblivious folks SP2 was written for, the rest of us are in the sights of a shot-gun approach to fixing what could have been taken care of with an SP1 type of patch.

Treeman

Many business support people, myself included, take the approach that you never install updates, patches or services packs just because they are available.  You review each and determine if it applies to your environment.  If it does, then you deploy it on a test machine to make sure that it doesn't whack out your computer or network.  Only then, do you deploy it to the organization.

The cost of employee downtime is too great to take chances.

Although I have done installs with integrated builds, I  haven't deployed this as an upgrade to any my business customers.  No need to.

Hi Relder, Point taken, nice post. But do you know this guy?

He never has anything but the OS on his computer, well maybe SiSoftSandra and a host of other benchmark applications.

When he get's new hardware for his computer, it's like a guy that buys a new 4 barrel carb for his ride. He has to take it around the block to see how it runs now!

I'm not saying I'm that person. But I did push the button that installed SP2. I guess i'm a little compulsive. I do however wait a week or so, to see the remarks posted about an update before I load it. To the many folks that have told me to, "just strap on a pair" and do it, well not so fast. I intend to take every precaution on this machine the next time I try.

I just have a lot of sympathy for IT professionals that have maybe hundreds of PC's to update for "security reasons."

Treeman

SP2 has heaps of errors when installed on networked computers. That is why it isn't used that commonly in bussinesses.