bye bye IE 6 users
WinXP SP3 Means You Are Locked Into IE7. This week, Redmond notified the world that updating to WinXP SP3 means they won't be able to downgrade from IE7 to the older IE6 without uninstalling SP3 itself. This juicy bit of technical news appeared in a blog written by the IE dev team. It states: "If you choose to install XP SP3, Internet Explorer 7 will remain on your system after the install is complete,... Your preferences will be retained. However, you will no longer be able to uninstall IE7. If you go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, the Remove option will be grayed out." Here is the blog posting: http://www.wservernews.com/080512-IE-and-XP-SP3
RMS filtering
Microsoft announced on Monday it had put a filter in place so that XP SP3 is not offered to users with RMS installed. Then it released the service pack as planned. The company is working to come up with a solution for RMS users.
AMD reboot loop
Late last Friday afternoon Redmond announced that it had posted what it called "slipstream builds" of SP3 for download by subscribers of its IT professional and developer services. These slipstream builds integrate SP3 with WinXP itself into one single file that can be used to install the now upgraded OS on multiple machines without hooking up to a WSUS server.Redmond also seems to have found a workaround for the Dynamics RMS bug. And so after about a week, they re-released SP3 to the general public. XP users trying manually on Windows Update on Tuesday were able to get SP3, approximately 67MB in size. Oh, and it seems that the SP3 FAQ is an identical copy of the SP2 FAQ, some one in the UK tells me.The first major problem also seems to have surfaced. Some machines with AMD CPUs seem to go into endless reboots. Blogger Johansson said there are two separate issues. One is AMD-equipped PCs sold by HP. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality." The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS.
I'm not going to copy his whole blog though, here is a link to the details: http://www.wservernews.com/080512-AMD-CPU
The other thing you might want to check is this FAQ: What you should know before installing Windows XP SP3: http://www.wservernews.com/080512-XP-SP3-FAQ
