Being a help desk tech or a hack does not make you an "IT Professional"

The real IT Professionals either run Apple, though not likely, or will wait for at least a month or two before upgrading.

Apple servers still have too long of a way to catch up for a serious IT professional to use it as a server platform. As a client machine it's not bad, and easy to administrate, but still lacks alot that I love about PC's.

Either way, grabbing the newest coolest updates from MS without waiting, or at least trying it on a standalone machine is foolish and shows someone is NOT an IT pro.

I just verified that my "Automatic Updates" was turned off to make sure this monster doesn't get into my machine. It's working too well on SP2 to screw it up.

I just reformatted two days ago and noticed it installing, I haven't had any problems with it.

My computer, knock on wood, is probably working better than anyone else I know right now. I wont be making any unnecessary updates either.

The name of this upgrade is misleading. Basically it is the entire sp3 upgrade in one big file, so you can have a hard copy of the update, and install it on many machines without repeated downloads. As opposed to downloading a small installer from windows update, and doing a stream download of the needed files from windows update. Downloads and installs from windows update are usually slow and troublesome for me, given the choice, I almost always grab the network version.

I usually grab the network version to make it easier to install on multiple machines, or if something happens, I can install the upgrade if the drivers for the network card aren't working.

I generally find the network update for IT professionals to be a much faster install/update.

Psst..

Slashdot is >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Thataway.


All snarkiness aside, Apples have a lot of advantages as a single user machine, but mostly they have a lot of appeal to the PC hipster crowd.

MS was going to release SP3 earlier (like two weeks ago if I recall) but they pulled it at the last minute. Apparently, somebody just said "f**k it" and they tossed it into the maelstrom, thinking they'd deal with the casualties later.

I dunno. I downloaded SP3 and installed it a couple days ago. The install went off without a hitch and my computer runs perfectly fine with the update. No problems whatsoever. In fact, I ran the beta for a while with no issues either. I agree part of it is just the sheer amount of hardware differences Microsoft has to account for in PCs (Macs are all Apple, so they have a significantly less pool of hardware to have to test on). It can't be all that though, I think much of it is just customer stupidity.

Also, SP3 is an optional update. Microsoft isn't mandating that people download it, so it won't be downloaded even if you have automatic updates turned on.