I don’t run Windows XP (my PCs are a couple of years old and happy on Win2K… I don’t feel compelled to lumber them with the beautiful XP), but a lot of people I know do. I want to give one of them a copy of SP2 to install, to save a long boring troublesome download via dialup.
Problem? The SP2 download page lets you install it via Automatic Updates or Windows Update. Or you can order a CD. You can order it in any country, not just North America (good) but it takes four to six weeks to arrive (bad). If the average unpatched computer can be compromised in 20 minutes, in four weeks it could be compromised 2,016 times. (Okay okay it’s on dialup, so it wouldn’t be connected all that time.) Gimboids. Even the Download.com page for it pointed me back to Microsoft.
Happily, I did find it on an APC Magazine CD. I also eventually found the Butch Microsoft Technet Geeky Professional Developers’ download page.
You can download it from Microsoft if you go to the ‘for Developers’ link or something. It’s in there somewhere. And it’s 266MB instead of the 78MB that they give you on the automatic update. Don’t know why. It added about 1GB of crap to our hard disk when it was installed. Of course a 266MB download is only really practical if you have a permanent internet connection. It took me 7 minutes on cable. I fear it would be much longer on ADSL and impossible on dial-up because it would drop out eventually and not take up where it left of upon re-connection.