A Tech Nerds Rebellion!
While looking back at my life, I never really considered myself a rebel. It appears that now I am. As some of you may know, there has been a lot of controversy revolving around SP2 for Windows XP. There have been numerous articles throughout all the tech pages revealing flaws and shortcomings of the new service pack. For those of you who don’t know, I am a General Access Lab Manger otherwise known as a GALM. I am over a fair amount of computers. I haven’t ever counted the exact amount, but I’m guessing it is around 300 or more. IS decided to block SP2 and ban the installation of the service pack campus wide. This is all good and gravy for them, but I haven’t got time to wait. For most of the people on campus, upgrading to SP2 will consist of downloading the patch and running it. For me it means re-imaging 300 computers after hours. After doing some research and probing a GALM listserv that I am a part of, I discovered that their were known issues between SP2 and the following Software/Hardware:
DeepFreeze Enterprise
Norton’s Ghost
Pharos Uniprint
IBM Computers
Greattttttttttttttt! That just about sums up 100% of the platforms that I have in place. So what did I do? I blasted them anyway despite all the negative vibes (that’s the rebellious part). This is the way I look at. The entire IT world right now is looking at SP2 as a bad dream that will eventually go away. Get real, SP2 is here to stay so everyone needs to suck it up, patch their computers, and learn to deal with the changes. OOOPS I said the “change” word. Anyway, after installing SP2 I quickly realized that it was fully compatible with the following software:
DeepFreeze Enterprise
Norton’s Ghost
Pharos Uniprint
IBM Computers
Wow, those look familiar. OK, so it appears that the Anti-Windows rebellion is going a little to far and it is my assumption that software manufactures such as Faronics are getting tired of the bad rap their products are getting due to SP2 incompatibility issues that don’t exist. To make a long story short, every lab I have is setting on SP2 with zero known issues. And with a little help from group policy in Active Directory, I have kept the new firewall enabled on each computer. I figure a little added client side security is something that will help the next time someone brings MMC behind the firewall on his or her laptop. I like being able to sleep at night knowing that my computers are UP TO DATE. The rest of campus awaits the GO AHEAD.
Comments are open on this one. Keep it clean and constructive.
