Is SP2 Really That Evil?

Richard Rushing, CTO for wireless monitoring software firm AirDefense.

Richard Rushing, CTO for wireless monitoring software firm AirDefense, is certainly no outspoken advocate for Microsoft. He has painful memories about installing SP2 for his company's 100-user network. "I remember I had to download for my notebooks maybe 20 MB of firmware, BIOS patches and everything else just to get them to work," Rushing says. "It was not just SP2, it was all that the stuff that SP2 changed and how vendors had to rewrite the software to make the upgrades possible. Now it's like they're saying: if you are not going to upgrade, then we are going to end-of-life anything below SP2."

Even still, Rushing maintains that organizations should mandate SP2's installation for any networked laptop, especially those with 802.11 connectivity.

"There are some features in Windows XP native and SP1 that are dangerous. With native Windows XP, if I don't find the preferred SSID I want to connect to [over a wireless network], it creates an ad hoc network for it, by defaulting to ad hoc, which means authentication or WEP [no longer functions]," Rushing says. "Similar problems carried over into SP1, and a lot of the controls in SP1 were automatic, so that if I served up the same SSID in an ad hoc environment, you would then connect to that automatically. SP2 changed a lot of that."

SP2 also makes a noticeable difference in the available information about the wireless connections you access over 802.11 networks, Rushing says. "You get a lot of good warning messages, such as when you connect to an access point, you learn [with a warning] message that it is open and unencrypted, and it prompts you to see if you need to connect or not," Rushing says. "If you go from your home Linksys Wi-Fi router to another, you are prompted about whether or not you want to make the switch, and are given information [about the router]."