Jamie R

Firstly, for anyone who noticed, my site has been down for the best part of the afternoon and has only just come back up as of about 10PM due to the power supply dying on the server that my site is being hosted on. In truth, according to WM’s support, several of their servers had power supply failures. The whole event seems rather percurliar to me, seeing as Web Mania have their servers in a data centre which I am believed to have protection against power spikes etc. My host usually isn’t that willing to give out too many details about things.

My site wasn’t the only affected. Bryn’s East Coast Dubs site was also offline for about 8 hours. All appears to be well and stable again now though.

So the long awaited Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has finally been released. However, this release hasn’t been rosy for everyone. Pretty much every Windows Service Pack is bound to cause problems for some people with various configurations (look at XP’s SP2 for instance), so it’s hardly a surprise that SP3 has been reaping havoc on some people’s computers, in particularly AMD based HP machines with HP OEM installations of XP.

Jesper Johansson has written up a detailed insight into the problem of SP3 + HP AMD hardware + HP OEM installation of XP = dud copy of XP that doesn’t boot. If you’re having a problem of this description, then head over to his site and have a read.

I’ve installed SP3 on the few last remaining XP boxes that I have running and I haven’t had any problems whatsoever. I’ve also installed it on a couple of customer computers and haven’t had any adverse effects either, so on the whole so far it’s been a fairly positive result.

Jamie.