Say Goodbye to Massive Windows Service Packs
Say hello to much smaller, less drastic ones
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News
ITNews.com.au is running a story about how the days of "Big Bang" service packs for Windows are a thing of the past, that Vista will instead receive a steady stream of patches and fixes over time. However, service packs will still exist, they just won't be the massive affairs of Service Pack 1 for XP that came in at 30mb and bundled together a great number of fixes and updates.
The change in approach, according to Michael Sievert, corporate VP for Windows marketing, is due to new development tools and processes that Microsoft used in the creation of Vista lessened the need for the huge service packs of the past. In essence, Vista was designed to be more easily patched up than previous versions.
This move away from major, often cataclysmic, updates to Windows will likely have the highest impact on enterprise environments, where a service pack can result in multi-month testing and implementations projects that cost millions of dollars.
Reply #2 Tuesday, April 3, 2007 3:53 PM
Reply #3 Tuesday, April 3, 2007 4:43 PM
Reply #4 Tuesday, April 3, 2007 4:54 PM
Reply #5 Wednesday, April 4, 2007 3:17 AM
And yes, I agree, going through the update routinge with a new install can be quite.. annoying .
(oh, and I guess some people might have a slow connection for huge downloads, as well
)
Reply #6 Wednesday, April 4, 2007 12:35 PM
I think you misesd a number Zoomba, SP1 came in at nearly, or just over, 130MB.
SP2 is 266MB, and "if" SP3 walks out the door...it should top over 200 as well....seeing as a new install today, requires around 140-180MB of updates.
Reply #7 Thursday, April 5, 2007 9:30 AM
Good point. As it stands right now, we've slipstreamed SP2 into our XP install CD, but even with that, there's a good 50+ updates now to be installed.
Also, what happened to the announcement that they were going to "fast-track" Service Pack 1 for Vista, and have it ready for December? It's supposed to feature WinFS as well as other "features" not ready for the initial release.
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Reply #1 Tuesday, April 3, 2007 3:07 PM
I actually wish they provided MORE bundles of fixes....like quarterly roll-ups.