Zen Internet Support Forum

I have just bought an Asus 900 EeePC with XP pre-installed.

I have done the 51 outstanding Windows security update but not SP3. As anyone had experience of this update on an EeePC with 1Gb of memory and 12Gb of solid state memory?

I am a little worried about how it would handle such a big update resource wise.

I bought the EeePC after finding my laptop more than a little cumbersome being used in the car while on holiday. It is much easier to handle in a confined space and also easier to shield a small screen from the light.

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

Hello Ken,

Look if it ain't broke for goodness sakes DON'T fix it !!!. If the machine is working fine without XP SP3 leave it alone would be my sincere advise. Its FAR to easy to end up feeling paranoid if you beleive the Microsoft hype & non sense about why YOU MUST HAVE SP3. I just wouldn't bother with SP3 unless personal research proves that SP3 is totally essential otherwise its just going to be more MS Bloat-ware.

**NOTE:- service packs are a tradition or hang over from Microsoft windows NT days (cirrca 1991 ish). Service packs are just a collection of fixes, patches & hot fixes & security or OS updates.  Frankly, most windows updates a total waste of time & effort and only tend to reduce windows overall performance. The only updates worth having are the system critical or security critical updates.

**Sadly, windows service packs have become larger & larger over the years (75megs plus is common). Unless SP3 adds some fantastic new feature or is guarenteed in writing to increase the perfomance then don't bother with SP3.

**You could gain FAR FAR more security & increase XP's performance by tuning & tweaking XP and turning off non essetial system services than installing more MS Bloatware in my opinion.

Ivan

 

Hello Ivan how you keeping?

What you say is quite right but I havealways kept my PC's up to date and as I will use this little gem on other WiFi networks I felt that the latest security updates may help

I have done all the other updates so will probably be OK.

Zen's forum seems very quiet of late, maybe not enough things going wrong 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

Hello my friend Ken,

YES! nice to catch up with you too, Oh! I'm fine but trying to hold onto my sanity though looking after & trying to care for my elderly mother who seems to be a walking medical disaster zone i.e. one medical problem after another, and endless complaining to boot, Oh! well I guess that life? (I just hope that I won't end up being like that when I get to her age??).

**In windows XP just make sure you have disabled a) Terminal services b) Telenet service c) remote assistence etc. These are commonly tried by script kiddies & hackers as a first point of attmepted entry into your machine. Disabling these secures your machine a good deal.

**A decent solid firewall also goes a long way to putting off hackers & general computer low life.

**If your machine already has XP SP2 then thats good because MS tightened up the OS level security in SP2. I don't think you have too much to worry about if you take normal sensible precautions like wear a condom :-)) TEE HEE !!!!!!!

Ivan

I havent got a eeepc, but I have installed service pack 3 on 4 of my pc's and it went flawlessly each time and all of the rigs work perfect, no problems associated with sp3 at all.

Infact, on 2 of my machines I even made an xp disc from nlite with sp3 slipstreamed and even they are working perfect, so I dont think you will have any problems whatsoever if you choose to go the route of sp3 and install.

Personally, if I was you I would install it Ken, as it is worth it security wise and also adds a couple new features, not anything you will notice, but if you had installed the service pack, you wouldnt of needed to download all those 50 odd updates.

Bottom line, sp3 works perfect here, no probs at all and I now advise all clients to install it or I install it when working on their machines.

I agree with some of what Ivan says, but alot of it I dont agree with, updates and service packs are there for a reason, its stupid to not install critical updates and all service packs as they are designed to A, secure the OS and B, make it more stable and C, in some cases add new features.  Tweaking Xp cannot always secure and make it stable, infact tweaking is more likely to make xp more unstable, but I digress, some points I agree with and some I dont.

Hi,

I have to disagree with you, if your an experienced computer person & you know what your doing tweaking & tuning definitely does make XP far more secure in every way & I have never seen XP made unstable by the process I'm talking about. And YES! I have applied such tweaks to many many machines.

**When it comes to Microsoft Windows service packs & updates its my experience that the fewer services packs that have to be applied the better. You try having to rebuild a desktop or server and then having to apply x3 or x4 service packs on top of a build, frankly its a total pain in the bum! Not to mention the sheer waste of time incurred doing so.

**NOP! in my experience the leaner one can keep windows the better. In fact if I was braver I would strip XP down even further to its bare bones. Which can easily be done by a very knowledgable person, there are huge chunks of windows XP that can be totally removed. But although I have a good knowledge of XP even that is abit beyond me but it is possible.

Ivan

Stripping down XP and removing chunks of it is'nt the same as not installing a service pack, sure you can get rid of all the *** from XP with nlite and such but then once you start doing that it isnt XP and ripping the guts out of it can lead to untold and unseen problems.

Rebuilding a rig, whether its home pc's or business machines, they all have one thing in common, 100s of updates depending on how old the original XP media is, but I would rather install a service pack in 10-20 minutes than have to download 100+ updates in some cases and wait for them to download and install then reboot and then get updates for the updates, when a service pack makes it faster and easier.

I still also disagree with you that Tweaking can make XP secure, if that was the case, then we wouldnt need patches for it, we would only need to tweak certain things and that would keep us all safe, but it isnt so and as for the stability factor, yes messing with the guts of XP is asking for trouble, thats why MS and near enough every place who posts tweaks mentions that when tweaking with the registry, back it up first as problems can SERIOUSLY damage your OS, that isnt there for fun.

Now, I also use nlite and other tweaks to strip the *** out of my XP, its lightweight and faster than what it is at stock, but I dont class it as XP anymore because too much stuff has been ripped from it, but and I cannot stress this enough, It took me ages to get the right balance of  stability v speed, many nlite versions/cd's I made were no good because somethings I had gotten rid of interfered with someother thing and caused problems.

Basically, getting back to the topic at hand, we both can rip chunks out of XP, we both can tweak it, but without the addition of service packs it is never going to be fully secured, as service packs addd certain new security measures or close doors that were once open and in most cases tweaking just cannot do that, so the bottom line is, if your happy having an unsecured system, then by all means dont install service packs.

To me its common sense, if you use windows in this day and age, then you have to have service packs if you want to keep upto date security and stability wise, its just the way it is.

 

Hi,

I think you & me are never going to agree on this subject re: windows XP, I think we will just have to agree to disagree. I have been using a completely un patched, no service pack version of XP for the last 7years and although I have tweaked & tuned it (it has ALL its guts remaining, I havent removed anything at all its a standard build). It almost never crashed or BSD on me, its extremely stable and extremely secure. I do have a basic free firewall (zone alarm installed) and good anti virus etc.

I rest my case, enough said I think.

Ivan

Since my last post I have discovered by trial that  SP3 will not install on a EeePC 900 as there is not enough resorce (1GB memory and 12Gb solid state diskdrive).

The machine would really have been better with Linux installed but my print server will not talk to it and I do need to be able to print when it is logged into my WiFi network.

All good stuff and interesting to boot :)

 

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

I have now increased the memory to 2Gb and it's made a big difference to performance. I have also paired down XP and the installed software to the minimum usable for an online machine.

The EeePC now does a great job of communicating while online and away from home although I must admit to using it a lot around the house as it's so compact and the only real beef I have with it is the *** battery life, about 1.5 hours or 2 if the PC is doing very little.

I have been looking at one of the mobile broadband systems, I like Orange but I dought I would get good value out of one as I would only probably use it once or twice a month at a cost of £10 or £15 a month with an 18 month minimum contract. Quite a lot to pay even for the conveniance.

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

Hello Ken,

So did you install SP3 in the end?? I've been reading that SP3 is the last Microsoft service pack for the windows XP product line, & that its considered an optional service pack too (in other words its NOT essential to have it). 

NOTE:- SP3 doesn't add anything visably to XP in terms of the user experience (MS have stated this themselves) nor does it change the way the OS behaves or performs. It seems that what SP3 does add is all hidden stuff under the hood so too speak. Its mainly security fixes & security related updates.

**How did you get SP3 i.e. via update service, download the .exe or perform the registry hack to download it?

And finally has it made any difference.

Ivan.

hello Ivan

I downloaded SP3 and burned it to a CD to save doing it online for 3 PC's. No I did not update the EeePC as it does not have enough available space to do it (only quite small solid state hard drives) I am not to bothered about it as I have many more Windows updates like .NET not updated because of them slowing down the PC.

An EeePC is quite limited and XP is really not the best OS to run on it but I have a print server that I need to use and I have never managed to get Linux (Ubuntu, Puppy or Susie 10.3) to work with it.

The EeePC 900 that I have is just so good when I take it away from home because of it's small size. I did my back in while on holiday trying to get into a comfortable position in the car with a full size acer notebook. Only wanted to check my email too :(

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

Hi Ken,

Perhaps you need to upgrade to a larger car? TEE HEE :-)) **not very envirnomentally friendly perhaps though.

**Joking aside hope your OK and the back is healing up, sounds painful?

Ivan.

cyteck:

Hi Ken,

Perhaps you need to upgrade to a larger car? TEE HEE :-)) **not very envirnomentally friendly perhaps though.

**Joking aside hope your OK and the back is healing up, sounds painful?

Ivan.

Actually I did upgrade the car from a 1.1 Saxo to a 1.8 nissan Primera :) Not very green but stuff Gordon and all his mugging gang.

It happened last June Ivan so I am OK now thanks. Always had back problem due to working on cars for years and the first time it happened I dropped a rear hub assembly from a Rolls Royce on the deck and damaged the brake disk.

Could have been worse as it may have landed on my foot.

They took me home from the local hospital in the works ambulance and my wife could not stop laughing at me trying to get up the stairs :(

 

 

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Ken

Zen Active 8000

By the time a family pays off the mortgage for a home in the suburbs, the home isn't home,and the suburbs aren't suburbs.

Hi Ken,

So sorry! to be abit boring or pedandic here, did you actually install SP3? did you enclounter any SP3 problems doing so?? I've been reading wildly conflicting reports from a number of different web souces, some saying SP3 was the devils spawn and F*** my machine up big style to SP3 whats all the fuss about I installed it and have not noticed anything different? What do you recon then from your experience.

**Be interested to hear from anyone else who might have installed SP3 for XP.

Ivan.