Is it true SP2 is being forced on us soon?

Last night at my MCSA class I mentioned to our Instructor that I was giving my husband my spare copy of XP Home upgrade which I have running on my test computer because XP now ships with SP2 and my husband is not up to it if there are problems.

The Instructor said that after Christmas we will be forced to accept SP2 from Windows Update if we do not have it whether we want it or not. Surely this cannot be true if only because those of us with dial up access could never download it before we get timed out?

If it is true then I will roll my husband's computer back to Millenium.

I'm not aware of the service pack being forced onto us. You always have the option to switch off automatic updates.

SP2 I have installed on about 6 machines and had problems with one only, this was because it was blocking VPN access to remote customer sites, it was easily solved though.

As for your husbands PC, check the drivers etc, as this will be what gives you a slap in the ear with a wet kipper if anything. My advice? Pre-test your husbands PC, take a ghost image onto a spare drive, create a restore point and then apply SP2.

If it sucks and gives grief, restore the image, if it doesn't then you don't have to worry.

As I understand it M$ intend to pull support for all of the individual patches that are rolled up into sp2 & remove them from windows update, so not quite what your Instructor is saying - but same net result..

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Surely this cannot be true if only because those of us with dial up access could never download it before we get timed out?

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& this as well as your chances of being hit by a virus/DoS attack while you try to update is why sp2 is available on cd for free (well shipping only I think depends on market place) & also why its shipping that way now sort of like 98 & 98se did a bit .. This new version with sp2 bundled is already nicknamed 'xp SE' around my parts ;)