[ScinteX]

Hi,
This is my 1st post (blah blah its a pleasure etc. etc!)

Anyhow I have noticed that many people are concerned about XP SP2 and what it actually does.

More by coincidence than design my machine appears to have DEP deactivated, along with the pesky MS firewall.
Therefore you could somewhat argue that the upgrade to SP2 was fairly pointless!

Anyhow for you guys wanting to disable DEP you can specify this in the BOOT.INI file (run MSConfig from the Run command) and add in there:

/noexecute=AlwaysOff

My boot.ini actually has /noexecute=OptIn in it!

So I suppose the question is how did this happen? i have minimal services started (most of them are disabled and only a few on manual) so maybe this is to blame. I'm thinking that really I could just leave DEP off seeing as this was how it was before.
As a double check i tried some problematic apps (yahoo messenger V6 and Stardock Bootskin) and I haven't seen a warning anywhere.

A handy check for DEP on your system:
http://www.user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~normanb/

To be honest this whole scenario isnt really a problem for me personally (yet), although you may actually be wanting DEP activated so it could well be.

[AndyFair]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't DEP only useful on processors that support it (Athlon 64, Opteron, and Itanium)?
So if you're not running one of these CPUs, then won't turning on DEP have absolutely no effect whatsoever?

Rgds
AndyF

[ScinteX]

Now that's a very good point. You are porbably right- after all my world is solaris and oracle!
As i type this i have just spent a whole 6 minutes in Norton Ghost!
SP2 appeared to be the 'creeping death' - seemed ok last night and earlier today but it gradually made my system slower and slower. The final thing was that my network connection broke and I couldn't create a new one. For some reason the DHCP service kept being disabled and then XP was moaning about WMI (or lack of) and insisted that i restore from an earlier System Restore point. That's all very well apart from when your earlier restore point is pre-SP2!

All this seemed to happen after some benchmarking in Doom 3.

Anyhow I am not going to join the Flaming XP2 cart- SP2 looks good. Maybe i dont understand enough about it just yet in order to get to it's full potential.

Thanks for the wise words indeed