Archive for August 11th, 2004
Service Pack 2
Wednesday, August 11th, 2004
I’ve been running SP2 for a day or so now [ torrent ], and I’ve had no problems, except for the whole fiasco with replacing uxtheme.dll, the file which, when hacked, allows for custom XP themes. I use Binary’s Watercolor theme; it was the original Windows “Whistler” style, which is much cleaner and nicer than Luna, the default theme.
In any case, just wanted to say that the changes are mostly trivial and won’t break your computer. Neil has a much better review, which goes into much detail on just about everything. The main changes are for security; IE’s behavior for downloading ActiveX controls and .exe files has changed, and it also comes with a nice pop-up blocker. Gee, it’s looking more and more like Firefox. You also get a new “security center” window that tells you things you should already know, like “Your firewall is off.” Yeah. I know. I turned it off. But it should be helpful for a lot of people.
And my favorite change of all: the little throbber bar on the startup screen has turned blue! Oh, and, for some reason, SP2 has removed “Home” (and/or “Professional”) from the startup screen. It now just says “Windows XP.” Yeah, I have Home edition. It’s the same thing, honestly. I struggle to find why anyone would pay twice as much for Pro for about 3 extra features.