Does the service pack make the phone-home, “genuine advantage” notification mandatory? Until I know for a fact that it doesn’t, I’ll pass on SP3.

I put RC3 on a few machines, only to have some features “expire”.  Now I have to track those machines down and re-install 3.

(chuckles at how hilarious it is that MS has come out with a service pack when they have a new version they’re trying to promote)

Elwed, not sure. My machines all pass genuine advantage so it never even popped up for me.

The only genuine advantage is owning Mac OSX instead of Windows!

Agreed Moloch!

Yea, apparently SP3 RC fucks up IE7 upgrade if the machine doesn’t have IE7 before SP3 RC. Being that machines at work seem to have a difficult time getting updates, it creates a problem. But it sure was handy installing SP3 which took about 30 minutes compared to the 1-2 hours 25 updates took.

elwedriddsche said:
Does the service pack make the phone-home, “genuine advantage” notification mandatory?

if i’m not mistaken, and i could be, the phone-home genuine advantage notification became mandatory some time ago for sp2 to use windows update. IIRC they made it one of those packages that blocks windows update until you install it.

because of a motherboard failure (good thing i had a spare on-hand) four days after sp3 rtm, i slipstreamed sp3 before wiping and installing winxp. i do not see wga in add/remove or in the task manager, but that could just mean that microsoft doesn’t want me to see it.

l8r

if i’m not mistaken, and i could be, the phone-home genuine advantage notification became mandatory some time ago for sp2 to use windows update. IIRC they made it one of those packages that blocks windows update until you install it.

I’m running auto-update in a mode where I’m prompted to confirm what to download and what to install and WGN can be opted out without any apparent problems. I haven’t visited windowsupdate.microsoft.com lately, because it wants me to install an updated ActiveX control or whatever that strongly reeked of forcing WGA/WGN on me.

I couldn’t care less about the windowsupdate site, as long as ctupdate keeps working…

i did a little poking around on my system and the internet this evening.

on the net the info i can find (pre-sp3) indicates that wga is based on three files LegitCheckControl.dll, WgaLogon.dll and WgaTray.exe.

i cannot find either of the wga*.* files on my freshly formatted and sp3 slipstream loaded hard drive, but the LegitCheckControl.dll is in the system32 directory. the properties of this file indicates a description of “Windows Genuine Advantage Validation”.

i checked the windows update history and wga is not listed as having been installed. so it does appear that wga is integrated into sp3. although i have not been able to find out if there is any “phone home” activity at this time.

l8r

I suppose I could have wasted some quality time with a VMware image to toy with that. There are a few comprehensive pages with a dozen or more methods to get rid of WGN and they all mention these DLLs…

Regardless, first I’ll wait for the service pack for the service pack

Windows XP SP3 sends PCs into endless reboot

Odd. I’ve installed it on a number of PCs running XP here without issue.

I’ve only noticed two things at work:
1) Nothing happens and everything seems fine
2) The computer goes ballistic is IE 6.0 is installed on the computer you are upgrading to SP3. BE SURE you upgrade IE before going to SP3!!