I really wish this would change; my only copy of CHECKED XP is scratched
and works in some drives, sometimes. Perhaps with the XP
on-new-machines concessions made to Dell, et. al., it will, but I doubt
it. I get why they would prefer people to use Vista, and these days
they’re probably a little anxious about it, but why would they wish to
get in the the way of people developing the drivers that, according to
them, account for most of the instability in the system? I suppose it’s
just a case of no who makes the decisions particularly caring, but it
still hurts them, in my opinion. Whether they wish it or not, XP does
not appear to be going anywhere, and probably will not in companies
until Vista gets considerably more reasonable, in my opinion.
I had never really considered that internally checked builds aren’t
popular, but that would go a long way towards explaining why, in the
NT4/2K era, checked service packs commonly no symbols, which was really
frustrating, and also why I guess it wasn’t a very big deal that damn
close nothing to would install on those same checked builds unless one
was willing to just keep hitting enter for all the user mode asserts the
installer generated. That was really irritating.
The part about this that really sucks, for me, at least, is that checked
builds are the only thing that makes MSDN worth paying for, as I don’t
use SQL, et. c.; everything else is online, more or less, and in
practice you have to download it anyway as basically nothing comes on
the disks when you need it.
mm
Don Burn wrote:
No what I am referring to is if you joined MSDN after XP SP2 there quickly
came a time when you could get the checked files changed for SP2/SP1 but you
cannot get the base OS checked. Microsoft has not slipstreamed a full
checked system with SP2 that can be installed by customers who came late to
the party.
Worse yet, when I have inquired if I could provide them a copy of the
checked CD, of course Redmond replies of course not that would violate the
license. When I mentioned this Microsofties at WinHEC I got two responses,
either something about management not having their act together, or “why
would you want the checked build anyway”.
