Exactly. With XP I waited until SP2 because of the SP1 horror stories. With 7 I also heard some unpleasant things about SP1, so I never installed it; waited for SP2. When I heard there would be no SP2 I didn't worry about it because my regular 7 was working just fine, and I kept it updated anyway.
Then I found out that support would end in April for non-SP1 7's. So I finally got it earlier this month. To my pleasant surprise there were absolutely no issues with the update, and none since. This could be due to the fact I had to reinstall 7 after a HDD death, so perhaps any junk that might have gotten in the way was gone.
In any case, I am now happily cruising the Information Superhighway in my brand new SP1.
The problem with XP SP1 (original version) was that MS ignored the Prescott chip which used different microcode. That's why they released SP1a, which included the Prescott code.
It was also the beginning of the reign of terror in terms of Viruses, and there were a large number of infected machines, which updates barfed on. The SP2 pack was much more resilient, and failed more gracefully if necessary.
CBS updating seems generally to have made the update process more resilient and less prone to irremediable failure - even if it does have its minor drawbacks.
Hi there
You still haven't addressed the problem of how easy it is for the whole activation process to be bypassed --SP1 doesn't address the Piracy in any way whatsoever.
I don't know how W8 does it but it seems that the process is a lot more secure.
Note I'm not talking about UEFI and protected boot -- protected boot is a real pain for people who either "Dual / Multi-boot" or simply want to try out various OS'es such as Linux distros on their machines from time to time.
Making Bootable restorable images with UEFI secure boot systems isn't so simple any more either.
As far as "The reign of Terror" for viruses -- we've moved on hugely since XP days (now over 10 years ago) -- hacking individual computers isn't "Cool" anymore and detection in real time such as MSE in real time is streets ahead of what was available back then. (Note though MSE is still supported on XP so XP isn't as leaky as people think it might be).
What people want to do these days is more akin to "Cyber crime" - Bring down systems like NYSE, NASDAQ, FBI, CIA, Banks, International global companies (Shell,Coca Cola etc), Pentagon and generally cause total chaos.
Individuals when not involved in Cyber Crime find it much more profitable to operate simple Internet Fraud and Identity Theft -- I'll bet very few people on this board have any idea how much an almost undetectable Fake US Passport is worth on "The Black Market" and I'm not saying either --other than some people have amassed very considerable amounts of money like this. (Not me I might add- remember I've worked in some very "dubious" places in my career and seen this type of stuff).
Nobody is really interested in some socially challenged sub teen's attempt in spreading a Trojan or some miserable piece of malware these days. They don't do anything anymore as the remedy is nothing more than a simple image restore (15 mins on typical hardware).
Wasting time spending hours on "Virus removal" is simply total effort and time wasted - just reformat and restore.
If you don't have adequate and clean backup then you deserve everything you get.
Cheers
jimbo
They are going to get the equivalent of the SP anyway, it will just be many single patches instead.
