Update Windows XP? To wait or not to wait, that is the question.

Windows XP SP2

In case you haven’t followed the epic tale behind this newest update to Windows XP, perhaps you’ve been living under a rock or you’re one of those tree huggers out there enjoying the great mosquito West Nile virus infected outdoors, it’s time to update your computer again.

This time, it isn’t one of the many security updates we’ve been seeing nearly every other week since its release, while it does fix a number of security issues, Windows Service Pack 2 is more like a whole security suite. Included in this update is a whole host of services that many IT professionals felt should’ve been included in XP from the beginning.

The Firewall has been updated; a security center has been added along with a much needed popup blocker, an attachment manager for Outlook, and improved wireless functionality. There are a multitude of other enhancements all centering along these same basic security and browsing capabilities. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/sp2/features.mspx for a full list of the newest features of Windows XP SP2.

Many tech pundits and IT professionals have been warning against installing SP2 until after Microsoft has had a chance to work out kinks that may arise. In light of Microsoft’s past performance issues and tendency to rush product out the door to quickly and without enough testing this may be wise.

To test the reliability of SP2 we’ve installed it on 10 of our PC, each with different configurations. So far, everything has been working perfectly. There haven’t been any crashes or conflicts with already installed software. One of the machines we created a wireless connectivity issue and after SP2 was installed, it automatically fixed the problem. We’ll have to see what happens over the next few weeks but so far, SP2 seems to be a far superior update compared with SP1.