A few years ago when the second service pack for Windows XP (SP2) came out I had just purchased my first iPod. It was a 40 gig 3rd gen with a black and white screen. That purchase was soon followed by a USB 2.0 card expansion card for my PC which was necessary to connect to the iPod at the proper speed.
However, the drivers that came with the USB 2.0 card didn't work and no amount of hacking around or reinstalling resolved the issue. And then I installed SP2 for Windows XP and the included drivers worked like a dream with the new expansion card.
The story is often the same for Wifi. Pre SP2 WPA enryption won't work. Post SP2 everything works flawlessly, or at least it was the easy fix in many of the cases I fixed in Yemen.
Fast forward to 1 week ago and I had the most bizarre and hard to track down fault with XP which is difficult to describe. Basically I clean installed XP including SP2 and many online forms would not submit. I was trying to search according to a criteria on a job search website and when I clicked "Search" the connection always timed out. It was a similar story on facebook too. I'd write a large message, hit send and it would always timeout and not send.
Then I installed Vista on my PC, which totally beyond my PC, but it proved that I could submit data from forms without an issue.
Then I formatted and went back to XP and again the forms were timing out. I installed .Net Framework, Office 2003 including Access but none of those upgrades got the forms work.
Then today I installed SP3 by downloading it from majorgeeks.com and now everything works again. I can search the job website and submit messages on facebook. No clue what aspect of SP3 fixed the fault. It turns out those 1000s of windows updates do something useful after all.
However, the drivers that came with the USB 2.0 card didn't work and no amount of hacking around or reinstalling resolved the issue. And then I installed SP2 for Windows XP and the included drivers worked like a dream with the new expansion card.
The story is often the same for Wifi. Pre SP2 WPA enryption won't work. Post SP2 everything works flawlessly, or at least it was the easy fix in many of the cases I fixed in Yemen.
Fast forward to 1 week ago and I had the most bizarre and hard to track down fault with XP which is difficult to describe. Basically I clean installed XP including SP2 and many online forms would not submit. I was trying to search according to a criteria on a job search website and when I clicked "Search" the connection always timed out. It was a similar story on facebook too. I'd write a large message, hit send and it would always timeout and not send.
Then I installed Vista on my PC, which totally beyond my PC, but it proved that I could submit data from forms without an issue.
Then I formatted and went back to XP and again the forms were timing out. I installed .Net Framework, Office 2003 including Access but none of those upgrades got the forms work.
Then today I installed SP3 by downloading it from majorgeeks.com and now everything works again. I can search the job website and submit messages on facebook. No clue what aspect of SP3 fixed the fault. It turns out those 1000s of windows updates do something useful after all.
