In ,
Bill in Co typed:
BillW50 wrote:
In ,
glee wrote:
"BillW50" wrote in message
...
In ,
snip
You know I have over a dozen XP machines here with almost all of
them have been updated to SP3 years ago. But if I had to do it all
over again, I don't think I would.
As most already know, making any changes to an OS carries a risk of
causing stability problems. And since the day Vista was released,
Microsoft has not shown any evidence that they care about any
stability problems that any security patch causes with XP. As when
SP3 broke compacting with OE6, Microsoft just didn't care and never
bothered to fix it. That is only one example, but you get the idea.
SP3 didn't break compacting in OE. There is a Registry counter
that gives you a prompt to compact after 100 closings of OE. There
were a few programs that interacted with the counter after SP3 was
installed, causing the counter to increase more quickly than just
with OE closings. I've not seen the issue on any systems I have
worked on since SP3 was released, others have. Apparently some
Nero plug-ins could increase the count but I never saw it and I
have been using Nero for years, the Mailwasher program interfered,
and supposedly installing Windows Live Mail also affected the
counter. The counter can be manually reset through a registry
edit, and Tom Koch made a tool that manually compacted on demand
and also reset the counter at the same time. None of these are
necessary, if you don't use Mailwasher or install WLM.
Oh boy! Yes SP3 did break compacting with OE6. As the newsgroups lit
up about this problem when SP3 was first released. And Bruce Hagen
often talked about it. I didn't see it at first, but I did finally
run into it (actually years after having SP3 installed). What I had
seen happen is it actually compacts just fine at first and the very
last thing it tries to update is folders.dbx. But it can't and an
error message states it is in use by another application. Here read
this:
http://www.outlookforums.com/threads...compact-files/
I don't actually follow Bruce's advice though. As all of the years
I've used OE, I almost never compact and I personally haven't ran
into a single problem not doing so. But I don't doubt for a second
that others can and do have problems. Oh yeah, my fix is to tell OE
to go offline and close OE down. Then reopen it and OE won't be
doing anything but just sit there. Now compact and don't do anything
else with OE until it is done. And that always worked for me so far.
And yes I know all about the counter and how it works and all. And I
might be wrong here, but I thought the counter thing was put in
there by SP2 and not SP3.
I think it was SP3, too - not SP2. As I recall, up until SP3, OE
would run compaction in the background, (which was problematic for
some people). I personally liked it, however (for doing that), as
I'd never do anything else when I heard it running the compaction
(about 15 seconds after opening OE each time), so I never lost
anything.
As for the OE bug, I've noticed it, too - what happens is after that
counter reaches 100, OE prompts you to compact, and if I do so right
then and there, I have issues like that error message you mentioned.
IF, however, instead I close OE, and then run the compaction, no
problems, and it compacts just fine. So what I do to avoid the
problem is either compact manually on occasion as I see fit, or wait
until OE flags it as being time, and then simply close OE and *then*
run the compaction, which always works fine.
I have dozens of unformatted spare drives here and I used one to restore
from the factory recovery disc. So with this drive anyway, I can play
around for a while to see how it behaves with SP2 without any later
updates. Too soon to tell you anything as of yet.
As far as security updates protecting you from infections, I too
believed this was true too. But over the years I started to have
doubts about this since I wasn't seeing any real evidence. I've
been running Windows since '93 and I never had an infection on any
of my computers yet. And on some of my computers I have stopped
security updates for years now and still I never had an infection.
There must be a reason for this?
Famous last words: I don't install security updates and I never had
an infection. But others have, even with updates installed,
because so many infections are due to social engineering. If you
are smarter than the average bear and practice Safe Hex, you are
unlikely to get an infection. Most users need the security
updates. By not installing them, you leave yourself open to
getting pwned due to a security hole, and you and your AV will
never know.
I understand all of this. And I base my opinion on testing on about 6
computers for over 5 years. And if not updating someday becomes fool
hardy, no problem. I have tons of backups to fix that problem really
quickly. But others should be doing this too if they want to stop
updating anyway.
And my beef about updates is that I am not troubled by malware, but
updates breaking something I am constantly fighting over. I have
over 20 computers here and it doesn't take long before an update to
screw up at least one of them. So maybe you now know where I am
coming from.
My beef about updates is similar to yours: I don't want to have to
deal with the fallout which occasionally occurs with these (or any,
for that matter) "updates".
But I'm also very attentive and watchful about this computer and its
environment, and I'm the only user.
That said, I sometimes find it advantageous to occasionally update a
select few programs, from time to time. But I've learned to keep the
older editions just in case, and there have been several such cases.
:-)
Newer versions generally get more and bloated which can be a source of
problems itself. Although sometimes newer versions take away some
features that used to be there in older versions. Lots of examples, but
the one about Windows Live Mail 2011 not having the ability of quoting
is probably one of the most recent one that is the current talk.
--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - OE-QuoteFix v1.19.2
Centrino Core2 Duo T5600 1.83GHz - 2GB - Windows XP SP2