I was getting the hint that Microsoft was not that serious anymore about XP. They are a way too caught up with promoting vista that they forgot about their previous successful operating system. A lot of people still love XP and the love fest increased more as Microsoft decided to stop supporting XP starting from July I believe.

Initially when vista came out it was absolutely a horrible experience as a lot of drivers didn’t work in Vista at all. It looked like a total new operating system. Many people I was talking to was considering to move to MAC rather than trying to play around with Vista. The condition however I find dramatically improved with SP1. Still a lot of people have beef with vista.

This post is about XP but I had to give my 2 cents on Vista. Their newest SP of XP is a plain joke. It looked like as if they promised a SP and so they had to provide one. Microsoft admits that this SP will not dramatically change the XP experience. However they are wrong. It might absolutely screw up your current experience. I don’t think they invested enough resource in researching and troubleshooting. Therefore, we saw them at the beginning delaying it and now we are seeing them really screwing it up.

ItBusiness.ca, one of the sites of the company that I work for ran a story today about how Symantec is blaming the Service Pack for a lot of issues.

“We finally got to the bottom of this last night,” said Dave Cole, Symantec’s senior director for product management of its consumer software. “All of these problems are related to the same thing, a Microsoft file that created all the garbage entries [in the registry].”

He also said that some of the same symptoms had been acknowledged by Microsoft when users updated to Windows XP SP2 several years ago; Cole referenced a pair of Microsoft support documents to back up his claim.

Two weeks ago, after Microsoft launched Windows XP SP3 on Windows Update, users started reporting that their network cards and previously crafted connections had mysteriously vanished from Windows after updating with the service pack. The Device Manager had been emptied, they said, and Windows’ registry, a directory that stores settings and other critical information, had been packed with large numbers of bogus entries.

The lesson would be to wait before taking the step. I haven’t updated to SP3 yet. I really hate to get into useless issues as I believe in getting things done. If SP3 delays me then I so don’t want it anywhere around my computer. I might just stick to XP and upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out in 2009 as planned. Unless I really need I don’t want to move to a new operating system that might well be discontinued in less than 3 years.