Corporate users of Windows XP will, from today, find
they are downloading a 100Mbyte Service Pack 2 security update
unless they have disabled Microsoft’s automatic update
service.
Many organisations have yet to deploy SP2, which was released in
August 2004 with the aim of making the operating system more secure
by default.
AssetMetrix Research Labs studied the IT environments of 251 US
companies operating 136,000 PCs and found that only 24% of those
running Windows XP had installed SP2.
Microsoft said 185 million copies of Windows XP SP2 have been
downloaded worldwide by corporate and home users. “We would like to
see more, of course,” said Scott Charney, vice-president for
security at Microsoft.
When Microsoft first released SP2, the company recommended that
enterprise users take the necessary time to test and evaluate the
service pack before deployment.
“We are seeing an uptake in the number of enterprise customers
deploying or committing to deploying SP2,” a Microsoft spokesman
said.
Microsoft said a recent survey it conducted showed that
businesses were keen to deploy SP2. The study of 800 enterprise
users found that 77% planned to deploy the service pack over the
next six months.
Financial services company Merrill Lynch plans to deploy SP2
across 50,000 PCs by the middle of the year.
Charney said, “The goal is for the widest possible penetration.
It is a fairly large service pack.” Some organisations will require
the complete installation, which is 250Mbytes.
“We have built better technologies, that will download pieces of
it to improve the user experience,” he said.
The service pack offers improvements to the Windows Firewall,
which is switched on by default, and support for non-execute chip
technology, which is designed to reduce damage caused by buffer
overflow programming errors.