I’ve now had some experiences with XP SP2 – Microsoft’s latest security fix. So far, I’ve noticed some good things and also some bad things. All in all, I think it’s better to have it than not to have it.

One bad thing that happened is that I installed in on our friend Andrea’s Dell Inspiron 1150 laptop. It immediately started running at about a quarter its normal speed. In the end I came across mention of this on Google and fixed it by backing out the CPU driver that SP2 had updated.

The other thing, which is still causing us grief, is that our Xerox WorkCentre XK35c printer will no longer print properly. It insists on popping up a cartridge cleaning wizard every single time you print – even if you’ve run it before, despite the assurance that it will only happen once. Further, this wizard always pops up in my login profile – never in Michelle’s. So, as far as she’s concerned, she goes to print and nothing happens at all. We may end up having to buy a new printer because of this – which would not be a good thing.

Some of the good things I’ve seen are more cosmetic than anything else, but I appreciate them. Graphic redraw between user profiles is better. I can now mute the sound in one user profile and not have the changed sound volume icon mess up in other profile, which it used to do. Similarly, sounds heard in an “inactive” profile now actually come through to the active one. Which is interesting – I don’t recall that happening before.