Since Microsoft is hording XP Service Pack 2 for individual users till possibly later next week, you can download in from my computer.

This latest service pack is a whopping 266 Megs.


\\joshua\Public\WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe


-Jason (http://www.tj3nw.com)

On a side note, a site was distributing this via bittorrent... but M$ threatened legal action against them citing DMCA. I guess they don't like 3rd party distributions of the updates at all, but damn, seemed like a great idea! Who knew saving bandwidth is on their shit list?!

Check out the story here.

why not download the express installer here it's less than 2mb and then you only have to download the files you need. Avg is about 90-100MB, helluva lot better than over 200mb

Because downloading a file off of the LAN is orders of magnitude faster than getting it from Redmond. Additionally, you'll not be adding to UMR's bandwidth saturation problem.


As usual, all people who download a file from an unofficial mirror should run a virus checker over the file and compare MD5 sums. Check the bottom of http://sp2torrent.com/index.php for a supposed "good" MD5 hash.

shit that does make sense, my bad... download the full thing

Yes I agree. It is always prudent to protect ones computer, but please know that the computer that this file is on does have up to date virus protection software on it, and that I got the file directly from Microcrap (Microsoft). -Jason

Just a note, for all you DivX fans, the most recent verions of the DivX codec have fatial issues with SP2. It's just somthing to consider before jumping into SP2.

Does that include ffdshow? Or just the Official, Corporate-Backed DivX?

To my knowledge it's just the official release of DivX. I do know that some codecs such as Xvid, that can decode DivX can play the files under SP2, but the native DivX codecs will not work.

Also, there is a limit on the number of socket connections per port with the new SP. So most of the P2P programs that use many connections (eMule, BitTorrent, Kaaza, etc) will not work as well, or at all. This is supposedly to slow the spread of worms that use the same port to e-mail stuff out.

I heard that there are hacks out there to get that limit up to 50...

I'm not sure how many these programs actually use on average for one file transfer, I suppose it depends on the number of connections.

Look here for info, also for info on the DivX problem.

Any news on it not working with various pirated cd keys? Cause I remember with SP1 they changed some algorithms to fuck up Windows if you were using the FCKGW-RHQQ2-...... cd key, as well as a bunch of others. I'm using an XP Corporate key that has worked so far, and let me update to SP1, but I'm hesitant to download SP2 unless I know my key will work with it.

Is the built-in firewall fixed so that it doesn't block SMB shares? It's kind of pointless to have file sharing if winblows' own firewall blocks it.

Here's a long list of programs that the firewall will block or break:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;842242

i had heard that they are making SP2 to work with all pirated versions of windows, because a lot of users with pirated windows cd keys were not updating their windows for fear of ... well you know. just what i heard

and what DOES service pack 2 do? does anyone know what changes it makes? why do i need it why should i care