Will be available tommorrow, already on some sites. Will you upgrade immediately or wait? Are there any benefits for computers used to trading?
I've been supporting high windows systems the very first release back in the late 80's. It will be several months before I will put on the latests service pack based on extensive experience. Mircosoft has released there fair share of buggy service packs that have been immediately pulled off their website after the release date. NT service pack 3 was a fisaco and many others MS releases. Wait and followup with websites decicated to tracking MS patches then decide. My cents worth. Bsulli
many of the win2k pro sp's slow down your system like crazy. i think there was one in late spring of this year that had that effect. not sure which one, tho...
I agree. You should always wait several months, so MSFT can fix any bugs. There are always a few that slip past the programmers.
Service Packs: We generally install them on one system, and if there appear to be no problems we go ahead. The bottom line is that MS is pretty good these days with the service pack releases for Windows 2000 OS. We dont worry about the 2000 service packs: besides if there is a problem you can always roll the configuration back to the prior one - option at setup. Windows 2000 is a great OS and we have been running it since release with 99.9 percent uptime which is much better than the prior releases. In fact the entire 2000 server line: Exchange server, SQL Server 2000, and ISA 2000 are very very stable and reliable, and these days they are relatively low cost to maintain especially with the built in enterprise management layers and tools: much better than previous releases.
Since SP2, there have been many "critical updates" which could have been downloaded from MS site. Will there be more to SP3 than "SP2 + all the patches since the release of SP2"?
Oh yeah. In addition to those updates, MS has fixed many other bugs. When a customer finds a bug, MS can fix it for them. That fix is called a "hotfix", and it's not as thoroughly tested as Service Packs are. After some time, Microsoft puts a bunch of hotfixes together (and whatever else they want to change or fix), tests it thoroughly, and releases it as an SP. In general, I'd advise traders to run the latest SPs. If you are not experiencing any problems though, I'd wait a couple weeks to see if other people run across some unexpected situations.
It out now, I just installed it, no problems at all, booted up a bit smoother. http://download.microsoft.com/download/win2000platform/SP/SP3/NT5/EN-US/w2ksp3.exe