"BillW50" wrote in message
...
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.
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.
Regarding OE compacting, we are talking about the same "issue"...
compacting was not "broken" however. Background compacting was the
problem, but compacting when closing OE or manually compacting while
offline worked fine.
I've never had a critical security update mess up a computer, unless the
computer was infected with a root kit or trojan. I'm not talking about
half a dozen computers, I'm talking about the neighborhood of 50 to 75.
I never updated while running other programs, and always disable the AV
during update installation. Most of my clients did not follow that
procedure though, and they still never had update problems. When people
tell these tales of critical updates killing their system, it has always
been due to other issues in every case I have seen. I'm curious....
when was the last time you checked you system for root kits and trojans
with Windows NOT loaded.... booting from a Linux-based AV rescue CD?
--
Glen Ventura
MS MVP Oct. 2002 - Sept. 2009
CompTIA A+