A study released by research firm AssetMetrix Monday indicates that even though April 12 is quickly approaching, the day when Automatic Update will attempt to force Windows XP users to install Service Pack 2, less than a quarter of businesses have made the upgrade. The study looked at 251 North American companies, consisting of about 131,000 computers. "Microsoft allowed a significant period of time to accommodate companies' demand to test and validate Windows XP SP2 within their IT infrastructure," said Steve O'Halloran, managing director of AssetMetrix Research Labs. "To date, we have observed that 40% of companies using Windows XP have actively avoided upgrading to SP2, and only 7% have actively accepted it," O'Halloran continued. "The other 52% of the companies showed no direction or policy towards SP2, and may find themselves having support issues by allowing multiple editions of Windows XP to exist in their infrastructure." While the upgrade is not going to be mandatory for customers, new products, including Internet Explorer 7, will require that SP2 be installed. In addition, support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 will cease in September 2006. Source: BetaNews
Honestly, a lot of people experienced severe stability and networking problems after applying SP2, and failed to notice a marked increase in system security as a result of it. For a while, HP's phone tech support dept. reported that over 50% of their support calls were SP2 related! SP2 will remind the grizzled NT4 admin of SP6 - what a nightmare that was. Once the horror stories started pouring in, most wise admins witheld the patches from client systems, recognizing that the threat of being hacked was better than the certainty of the ill effects of SP6. NT4 SP6a was finally released as a bug fix to SP6, which was eventually accepted (although cautiously) as being a viable update. I think maybe a lot of companies were waiting for the "SP6a" equivilent of XP's SP2. ...just a thought.
Or a service pack made for XP but not made by MS. I prefer to use SP1 on my old Pc, it seems nippier than with SP2. And I've not had any problems with being hacked (yet). Also with SP2 its not easy for me to do a repair install when the time comes.
