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"SP2 and Broadband Migration"

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Microsoft Monitor from Jupiter Research is required reading for any serious Microsoft watcher. Joe Wilcox got the blogging bug early and hard, and often comes up with the story-behind-the-story - stuff about breaking Microsoft news that even I didn't know. But I think Joe is missing part of the story in his recent pick-up of Ian Fogg's post on "SP2 and Broadband Migration".

Ian argues that SP's bandwidth-hogging automatic update process will be a great opportunity for ISPs to upsell irate customers from dialup to broadband. Now, SP2 does indeed want you to use automatic updates (as do we all!), but it's a whole lot smarter about how it fetches those updates. Specifically, it only uses "idle" bandwidth, and it restarts interrupted downloads where they left off. The first feature minimizes the impact on customers, while the second feature means that even if a customer is only online for half an hour a day, big updates will still make it through, one little chunk at a time. Put these two features together, and I really doubt that SP2's auto-updates are going to cause a sudden surge in ISP customers switching to broadband.

For a full description of these features, check out "Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2". If you're a dial-up customer, hopefully you'll never notice a thing until that little "toast" pops up (geddit?) to tell you that it's automatically downloaded and installed an update. And if you're really worried about how you're going to get SP2 in the first place, you'll be able to order it on CD-ROM - or just wait for the September issue of many computer magazines, which will have it on their front cover.

Update: XP SP2 has now been rolled out to Windows Update, and the CD ordering process has gone live.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2004
    BTW, where does Microsoft store the trickled down updates and how are they named?
  • Anonymous
    August 24, 2004
    Good question, and one I don't know the answer to. Is anyone from the BITS team reading this?
  • Anonymous
    August 25, 2004
    I believe BITS uses the following path for storing the files:

    C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataMicrosoftNetworkDownloader

    Can any BITS guru's verify this?
  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2007
    Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research has previously taken us to task for not doing enough to get SP2 into the