As a tech, I found out something interesting with the SP2. A computer store
locally is an OEM distributor and I even work through them to put on OSes for
people. He gave me a copy of “Gold” addition of SP2 so I can upgrade customers’
XP machines. For those of you who don’t know it, the “Gold” version is the
full-blown 255 MB version of SP2 that Microsoft provides to licensed
distributors, computer makers, etc. so it can be changed to fit their configurations.

I had to reformat my wife’s computer, and I wasn’t given the chance to put in
the CD to upgrade. Auto-update decided to do it by itself. I noticed, though,
during the download it was only about 90 MB. I already had Norton
installed and updated, so I was going to let it do its thing.

Man, was that a mistake. After the next reboot, Norton started to have
problems. I uninstalled and reinstalled Norton 2003 as suggested by the
error boxes, but it did not help. Norton died!

After playing around for about two hours trying different things, I got to
restore before I was going to do the reformat and put in windows exercise as
my last resort. I took out SP2, then instead of letting windows update from
Microsoft’s site, I put in the full-blown “Gold” version of the SP2, then left
to go talk to my mentor down at the computer store.

He laughed after I told him what I did and was doing at this moment, and he
said, “You’re the second person who got their hands on MS’s short version, and
it did major damage to his computer, too. I commented, if that is the case,
then I guess we are going to get a lot of calls on this one. He said, “Yep,
remember what you went through; you will definitely see it again.”

You might want to pass it on. [Mike Nelson]