Two brand spanking new Dell laptops show up for some friends/clients and I'm updating them before I deliver the little buggers. A series of snags rear their collective ugly heads. It's called XP Service Pack 3. XP Service Pack 3, and it's implementation on the Microsoft Update website are still a bit unable to deal with fresh PCs with mere XP SP2, or your average not quite up to date PCs.

The question is, what are the necessary patches.

Here's a few I've decided are required before you install SP3. You'd think they would have done some QA and automatically required these to be pre-installed, or perhaps just allowed SP3 to install them itself since it's suppose to be the giant metapatch to bring XP up to the latest updates. Alas, it's quite lacking without some intervention.

• Update Tool must be updated, since XP SP3 doesn't seem to bring it up to date.
• Internet Explorer 7 needs to be installed. XP SP3 doesn't upgrade the browser and you may have troubles (I had crashes) with the latest browser's absence after you upgrade. SP3 seems to assume you've already upgraded the browser to IE7.
• Some patches won't install after you've installed SP3, so patch all the IE security patches, drivers, and non-SP3 looking security patches before you install SP3. I've found it quite problematic to do anything that was a patch before SP3 after I've installed SP3.
• Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits is one I had troubles installing after SP3. Grab that one if you can.
• Software (Optional) updates seem to be particularly problematic post SP3. Chances are good that if you've not already installed all the optional tools you desire, SP3 will block security updates for those items you install afterward. Like I've indicated, I have no documentation or any idea what SP3 does to stop these updates, other than anecdotal experiences.
  • .Net frameworks need to be installed and updated.
  • Windows Media Player seems relatively immune to problems, but you may want to install it and update it before SP3.
  • ActiveX updates need to be installed and updated.
• Any new hardware drivers need to be installed prior to SP3.

There's 93 updates to be done if you don't install SP3 right off the bat. You'll want to skip most of those since it's just replicating the same updates to install SP3 afterwards. But, some of these updates won't install after you've installed SP3.

It's still somewhat of a guessing game for me. One way to find them is install the necessary Windows Validation and Updates tools, offered by the update.microsoft.com website, and then go ahead and install SP3 to get a list of updates it won't install. It'll fail on the new updates and you'll just write them down, uninstall the Service Pack 3 update, and then go back to install them, only to reinstall the Service Pack immediately afterward. Sound painful and wasteful? Yep. Sorry, that's the only solution I've got so far. The best I can tell, this problem comes about when SP3's release date comes after the update, then it somehow blocks installation of that patch. Perhaps it assumes the SP3 patch should have already addressed that particular problem. I've found it effects even driver updates. Some driver updates become available after certain security patches are made. So, this dance can get quite annoying.

There is another option. You can opt out of SP3 altogether, install the 93 or more updates individually (which SP3 seems to expect anyway), and ignore SP3 until you're sure you've installed all other updates.

Posted in tech jasonn's blog