Vocalo.org Ep 8

Hear the show here - http://vocalo.org/play/?playerID=13942 

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Wiidinitis
Microsoft Sued on Vista PC’s
NUDAR GPS

Feature - Service Packs

Vista SP1 came out only to crash certain computers. XP SP3 is out, and I’ve been running it – so far so good. When you go to update Leopard 10.5.2, you better have a good update, because that is the only thing you can revert to if the update doesn’t take. So when is a good time to update? Is any time a “good time”?

Service packs have been a part of the computing process since the beginning. Usually a Service Pack consists of a series of fixes that either have been put out earlier or have been requested by users, but not that critical to update. Sometimes those updates fix the problems, other times they cause new issues.

Vista seems to be the most fickle on this. With the original OS being so problematic, the hopes for a good service pack to fix the issues is critical. Unfortunately, their Service pack didn’t provide this. Microsoft ended up pulling the Pack because it would cause an “eternal reboot” issue.

When Vista came out, it was going to be lenient on some old hardware, but it definitely drew lines on backwards compatibility. You may have had to go out and get a new drive, video card, soundcard or even a new computer. It’s really not unusual to have hardware stop working with updates. Older VideoCams, for example, might not have updated software past their initial release - especially generic hardware. If the OS updates the video, the Cam would stop working.

So far we have focused on Vista, but there are Applications and Hardware that don’t work after updating to Leopard as well. Older Versions of Photoshop, for example, do not work with Leopard. Sometimes to move forward, we have to drop items that could cause more problems than not. After all, if Adobe is not putting out updates for Photoshop 7, then why should Apple try to fix it?

There are many types of hardware and even more applications. To try and appease everything would become insane. Especially if the companies are not even updating their software.

Still, if one puts out a Service Pack, it should work better than putting the computer in a constant reboot. It’s understood there are a lot of Hardware vendors and you can’t test 100% of all configurations. However if more than 20% of the users are seeing issues, then you really have to look at the testing process.

It’s not acceptable to have a Service Pack update cause more problems than fix. It’s not that difficult to test.