"So in light of Zone Alarm and other protections I use, I fail to see how my
computer activities and software can fowl up other computers. Perhaps you
can explain? - J Dent"

Hello all!

My client base ranges from individuals at home to small office businesses
(Real estate, contractors, Bed & Breakfasts, etc). Most of these folk have
no desire to understand how and why a computer works. They, especially the
business people, just want them to work right. They have never heard of
Zonealarm and have no idea what a firewall is. They are surprised and upset
when I run Adaware or some such on their computer and find hundreds of
exploits. In some cases, their anti-virus is out of date.

All my clients, once I have them under my wing, keep their anti-virus up to
date, have a firewall, and run Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy weekly
(well, at least they are told to update and run them weekly).

Whatever the numbers actually are, there is a sizeable chunk of computers
out there that have little or no protection against all the nasties. SP2 is
a big step towards defending these otherwise hapless machines. Will it cause
problems? Of course it will. Yesterday I read that it was thought to be
problematic in about 10% of all Windows XP computers. Along with that
report, it was stated that most of those problems were "small" (undefined).
And, that computers with malware on them were far more likely to have issues
with SP2 than a clean machine (that from Sunbelt Software).

I have advised my business clients to wait a bit before installing SP2, just
to be sure. They all, however have protection similar to Mr. Dent's. I have
also told them to check with the vendors of any software they depend on that
might break in SP2 (Like UPS Worldship, real estate web sites, legal
software, etc). Within a month, I will advise them all to update to SP2 if
nothing horrible happens in the meantime.

Sorry for the length of this, but... Mr. Dent: your machine is well
protected because you know what to do (mind you, if a new virus appears that
uses the buffer overflow issues that has been largely corrected by SP2, you
might reconsider). However for most computer owners, they do not have the
time nor the inclination to be as knowledgeable as we are. In my book, SP2
is a necessity for them.

Thanks for listening.

Will Stephenson
Acadia Technologies Inc.
mailto:[log in to unmask]

There are as many paths to God as there are people to walk them.

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