Windows XP Service Pack 4 Is Actually A Thing Now

[steve2470]

Last edited Sat Aug 30, 2014, 05:48 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.eyeonwindows.com/2014/08/27/windows-xp-service-pack-4-is-actually-a-thing-now/

Unofficial, of course. Remember all those unendorsed service packs for Windows 98 and 2000? Windows XP Service Pack 4 carries forward this tradition, and is now currently in its third beta.

A release candidate is to be available in the near future, ahead of its full release. Developer harkaz has been working on this unified release since September 2013.

Microsoft may have moved away from the service pack concept — even the upcoming Windows 9 is being primed as the last standalone version that will be updated at a steady pace with new features. But that is not stopping fans and users of the now ancient OS from keeping it in tiptop shape.

The unofficial version of Windows XP Service Pack 4, as it is known contains the operating system with all the required cumulative updated rollups injected. Up until May 2014.

more at link

I just don't get staying on XP, unless you absolutely cannot afford an OEM copy of Windows 7.

ETA: Ok, I do get it now. I had completely forgotten compatibility issues. My bad.

[hlthe2b]

1. Many businesses and professionals use very very costly speciallty software...

that is a fortune $$$ to upgrade to new operating systems. I myself have several thousand $$ worth of statistical software that only runs on xp. Why would I reinvest that money for new versions of the software that are essentially the same in terms of basic functionality. It isn't as though statistical procedures are overhauled every five years...

I do have a WIN 7 laptop, but I maintain a Win XP machine (off internet) for this purpose only.

[steve2470]

2. ok I concede your point, thanks nt

[PoliticAverse]

3. Yes, I think many people don't realize how many places run software that won't run on later OSes,

they just can't upgrade.

[steve2470]

4. I had completely forgotten that

Now I'm a tad embarrassed.

[arcane1]

26. Don't be. My employer upgraded everyone to 7, and we're still dealing with issues

Business especially don't like to spend more than they have to. In this case, we upgraded due to the ending of MS support, but we have MANY applications that don't like 7 one bit!

[steve2470]

28. thanks

I read an interesting article that made the case for M$ continuing to support XP and just charging for updates and security fixes. Made perfect sense to me. Sometimes I really wonder how bad the groupthink is at Microsoft. Windows 8, by all accounts, has been a disaster.

[arcane1]

29. I imagine if you're a designer there, you need chage for change's sake to keep your job.

[Mnpaul]

5. Do you have Win 7 Pro, Ent. or Ultimate on your laptop?

If you do you can download XP mode(a full OS) and run it in a virtual machine in Pro. It was designed to allow businesses to use their older software. It is secure due to the fact that XP virtual install uses virtual memory addresses. This makes it hard to hack.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/install-and-use-windows-xp-mode-in-windows-7

[hlthe2b]

6. I do and that is my backup plan when the old computer finally bites the dust..

I purchased a full copy of win xp and downloaded and archived all the updates for that purpose...'Glad to hear it is hard to hack installed that way. I also am glad to hear it is not complicated to do...

[Mnpaul]

7. You don't need a copy of XP

The download from Microsoft is free at the link provided. Virtual PC is also free and must be installed first.

[hlthe2b]

8. really? well that is interesting..

I have heard there are some graphical limitations to running it "virtual", but hopefully the program itself will be stable.

[Mnpaul]

10. It is not for running games

but I installed on my Win 7 tablet and it seems to work fine. I haven't tried many older programs on it, so I can't comment there.

[hlthe2b]

13. thanks a lot for your input... I think I may go ahead and set it up to test it.

[jrandom421]

9. Part of the problem with staying on XP after the end of support date

and this happened at a place I was working at that had very expensive instrument controller software running on XP. The software crashed during an extensive test routine and corrupted data gathered over several months. Calling the software vendor and giving the details, we were told that this was a problem with long term use with the version we were using, and this was solved by the Win 7/Win 8.1 version, released 5 years ago. If we didn't upgrade the software over the last 5 years, we would have to pay full price for the new version and send out the hard drive to a data recovery firm and bear the whole cost.

Needless to say, without support of any sort, we were taking the crapshoot that we could continue to use the software with no problems. We lost, and it cost us not only the price of software at full price, but the time and expense of data recovery, which was only partly successful.

Lesson learned the hard way.

[hlthe2b]

14. Well, I always back up data in different locations/formats

SO, if worse comes to worse, it would just delay the analysis.

[jrandom421]

15. The data corruption was only a symptom

We tried re-running the program with a new data set, but it shut down with an error, blue-screened, and corrupted the new data set even more thoroughly. The problem is the software is designed to acquire the data in real time and do its processing and analysis before recording anything. This problem was fixed in the version released in 2009, but the company thought that the price of upgrading was excessive, given that the software they had been using had been working with patches since 2001. We called the vendor, but they said there were no patches or fixes to the software version we were using for our issue, and the only real fix was to upgrade, which they've been telling all their customers since 2009.

[DavidG_WI]

17. Next time

Make sure you get the source code with documentation and make sure the program you get made is multi platform. That way even if the original developer disappears you can at the very least have someone patch it up to run on modern hardware or fix a security hole found in it.

f you have something custom written for a closed source OS, especially a Microsoft OS you are asking for trouble down the line. Even long discontinued closed source software has community patch sets to get it running on modern distros.

[ManiacJoe]

18. Virtually no business is going to sell you the source code

to any software they are marketing.

Even if they did, virtually none of their clients would be able to afford the software engineers needed to do the porting to a new OS.

[DavidG_WI]

20. Yet

game companies are doing it en mass these days for very cheap.

Non portable code is poorly written code, especially if it can't be used on newer version of the same OS platform. What they did was used a bunch of hacks to exploit bugs in the OS that could be patched at any time and would result in breaking their software.

Many companies also had their software written in house but bad data retention practices are why they have lost their source code, and these companies are being too cheap with their IT budget to have the situation fixed instead of hoping they’ll have the ability to keep an ancient piece of hardware running forever because not everything can be virtualized.

If you have the money to have a custom piece of software written make it a BSD licensed project and bring in outside help, you can hire plenty of freelance devs, Indian coders and bounty coders to get the job done if you don't have the in house talent.

[jrandom421]

19. For a data aquisition and analysis package designed specifically for

cancer cell genome study, something like that is never going to happen, especially with a single vendor worldwide, at over $100,000 per single seat license. We got it at a good discount, because we were a nonprofit, with good government funding at the time. We were told the new version was totally rewritten almost from scratch.

One of our researchers asked if they had or could port it to OSX or Linux, and was told that would happen only if he paid for the development costs, and waited another 5 years.

[DavidG_WI]

21. As stated before

Start an open source project if thats the case. For things like medical research all of the source should be available anyways so that the results can be independently verified by anyone in any country.

[jrandom421]

22. So how does open source

emulate such a software package without infringing on the original owner's copyright? How does anyone get the open source hardware to run the software, when the original hardware manufacturer has granted the software company an exclusive license to craft such software for their hardware? How many software engineers can you find with the skills, experience and expertise in data acquisition of cancer cell genome data, as well as doing the cutting edge analysis on such data, and do it essentially for free for this open source project? Where are these engineers going to get the resources to do this? Or does this software spontaneously appear, just because you start an open source project? If you can do it under $30 million, I'd like to see the project plan, resource allocation and timeline.

You can say it should be open source and freely available to anyone, but how does it get there?

[DavidG_WI]

23. You can't copyright math

So the only thing you have to do is have your devs not look at the actual code, so long as the code bases are different you can clone software all you like. Having it OSS means that you have the option of keeping it up to date without the need of relying on a company that doesn't want to support it anymore or has priced ou out of the market.

Theres no reason you can't have an OSS product that is paid for, Solaris, OpenOffice, Apache, MySQL etc IIRC all have paid versions and their licensing allows for the company to take from the community to enhance the paid version with the consent of the devs, the company also includes source code access with the license to the paid version for your company to enhance the paid version.

As I said, theres plenty of them out there, in the end it's all just math. as for how many are qualified, take a look at projects like http://fold.it/portal/ and Folding@Home http://folding.stanford.edu/home/ or any of these projects manned by gamers doing the work, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/25/online-gamers-solving-sciences-biggest-problems

Completely closed source software is never a good option to base your company around else you end up in the situations mentioned by others here eventually with each and every piece of closed source software.

You want to see an explosion in this kind of software, just wait and see if Microsoft gets compelled by the courts to release that user data stored in EU servers http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/08/30/220255/microsoft-defies-court-order-will-not-give-emails-to-us-government Watch as companies and governments throughout the EU and beyond drop software developed my American companies faster then you can say go. US companies and governments will then be forced to adopt some other software to still be able to deal with these firms.

As to drivers, drivers should always be open source, having them closed source means that the company has already planned on forced obsolescence as their buisness model and wont think twice about letting you go out of buisness because you can't find a compatible computer system any more to run your old device.

[jrandom421]

24. Don't get me started

on the Richard Stallman "All software should be free" rant. I've got enough problems right now overseeing a rebuild and restore of our Exchange server, after a couple of interns (who are in jail now) took it down, wiped the drive array, and attempted to install Fedora and replace Exchange with Send Mail without us noticing. Unfortunately, they didn't have or weren't knowledgeable enough to write drivers for the SAS drive array controller. They disconnected the drive array, took out the controller, and attempted to put in drives in the server case (kind of hard to do with a blade server!), when we caught them.

Not in a happy mood now.

[DavidG_WI]

25. I'm calling bull on that

on the Richard Stallman "All software should be free" rant. I've got enough problems right now overseeing a rebuild and restore of our Exchange server, after a couple of interns (who are in jail now) took it down, wiped the drive array, and attempted to install Fedora and replace Exchange with Send Mail without us noticing. Unfortunately, they didn't have or weren't knowledgeable enough to write drivers for the SAS drive array controller. They disconnected the drive array, took out the controller, and attempted to put in drives in the server case (kind of hard to do with a blade server!), when we caught them.

Not in a happy mood now.

Who lets interns access their systems like that unsupervised? How did nobody notice when the server went down? Anyone even marginally versed in Linux server administration would have known to build a test system first just to see if they could get everything running first before even considering dismantling the existing infrastructure.

[jrandom421]

30. Here's why

1. Not my department to watch the interns. They answer to someone else within our small non-profit.

2. Got the page and text message that the server was down, but I was in another part of the state.

3. Why didn't they build a test system? They thought they could do the replacement and get this done "virally" with what little they knew about Linux. They wanted "to strike a blow against the corporate software empire". They are acolytes of Stallman, and are true believers in the "all software should be free" mantra.

Again, not my department to have anything to do with interns. I didn't choose them, I didn't vet them, I didn't give them their access. This was all their own idea and doing, and that's why they're still waiting for their parents to bail them out.

[DavidG_WI]

31. Still calling bull

Any first year student would already know better, NO MATTER WHAT OS they are running. And if the hardware was any kind of new they would have started off with a virtualized server, again, no matter what the OS. By the time they are internship worthy they would know the basics like that, again, no matter the OS.

So yeah, I buy no part of your story.

[jrandom421]

32. Well screw you

You asked and I replied. So either I'm telling the truth or I'm a liar. I really don't give a damn what you think. Nobody asked you to "buy" anything.

So I still call your "all software should be free, even those tied to proprietary hardware" just a free software fevered pipedream fantasy.

[DavidG_WI]

33. Right...

I'm wrong because your story doesn't add up as possible in any buisness anywhere...

If what you say is in fact some way, some how true my only advise is run for the hills, that place is going down quick and you really don't want to be there for that.

[jrandom421]

34. Not running away anytime soon

It's a small non-profit that advocates for a cause that's important to my family. They've got a small IT staff that I volunteer to help with. I'm not in charge, so I don't get to set policy or decide how things are run. Don't get enough zeros for that!

[Earth Bound Misfit]

11. I tested it on VM and "live" system both worked a charm

Slipstreamed (with some modification to the SVCPACK.IN_ file & folder) into an SP2 Dell Re-installation CD My post @RyanVM Forum Also Installed SP4 standalone on an SP3 Virtual Machine, got errors at the 13 minute mark that developer Harkaz attributes to a bug in Adobe Flash integration... otherwise no errors in Event viewer or setup api log

[Earth Bound Misfit]

16. Beware of copycats, torrents, cracks... etc.

If anyone is planning on using this SP4, either the Beta version(s) or soon to be released (according to developer harkaz) "RTM" use the *OFFICIAL* Windows XP Unofficial SP4 download site @RyanVM Forum (free registration required) to download it, or Softpedia.com which is now hosting it. On both sites it is and always will be 100% FREE.

At least one copycat looking to cash in is already "in the wild":

[arcane1]

27. Thanks!!