Will there be a Windows Vista service pack 3 ?

Thanks for the reply. They are forcing people who bought Vista like me to move to Windows 7 indirectly i suppose.

Anyway, I'll wait and see/.

Why? They will still be releasing security updates, they will just be the individual kind, not rolled up into a service pack necessarily. It's not like they're winding down support for it like they've been doing with Windows2000 and XP. Would MS like people to move from Vista to Win7? Absolutely, since their current business model means that they only have revenue flows when people buy new copies of their software, but until MS decides to shut down the activation servers for the likes of XP and Vista, you should be able to use them in perpetuity if you are so inclined.

When I bought vista I was promised that it would be blah blah blah..

But I was nothing like that.

Thanks for your words of advice.

I just feel betrayed that guys who didn't install then when it was released are happy now!

Such is life. I'm sure Vista isn't the first product that failed to live up to the sales pitch in your life, and it will most likely not be the last. All you can do is just accept that it's not everything you hoped it would be and move on.

Are you sure the service packs help in terms of security if you are already installing all the individual updates? I believe there are Vista users who have installed the individual updates but no service packs (because of driver or BIOS incompatibility and/or the service pack doesn't show up in Windows Update) who have had no problems with malware, viruses, etc.

and add a few more.

Do they help in terms of security? Yes. They help where users have not installed any Windows updates before. It is difficult for Microsoft to identify individual cases, so SPs are a good idea.

They do no harm if a machine has been kept up to date and is otherwise running without issues. What we tend to find here in these forums are those uers whose machines have problems and they have not been sorted out before installing the SPs.

SP's don't generally, as far as I know, offer drivers. It couldn't because each computer setup is different. Similarly they don't issue BIOS upgrades. There have been the odd occasion where an SP has caused problems, eg the one last year, with SP3 for XP. But that was identified as an HP error with their AMD chips, and not a SP error.

Mark

That's a red herring. I have yet to see a service pack that has anything to do with the BIOS. Truth is, after you see the Windows loading screen, the BIOS is generally bypassed from then on because it's too slow.

Driver incompatibilities are also similarly rare. Unless Microsoft changes something about the driver model in the service pack (which would be exceedingly rare, and only done with EXTREMELY good reason) then it shouldn't have any effect on drivers at all. If it does, then the driver is poorly written and depends on things that it shouldn't.

People like to blame service packs for everything that goes wrong with their computer, but generally they're just a rolled up ball of all the updates released to date, and sometimes a few additional. These are all updates that DO NOT alter the behavior of the API in any substantial way, unless that's the only way to plug the security hole. Now, Microsoft has been known to add a few minor features with service packs, but they're hardly anything substantial. Probably the biggest update was XP SP2, which did a pretty substantial overhaul of XP's firewall... But the firewall was really a pretty minor component in the scope of the entire OS.

Service packs are generally a Good Thing(tm). The bulk of the blame they get for causing problems with people's computers is really the fault of something else.

A Geek Squad guy (long story, came in to solve some networking problems between different firewall programs) told me not to install any incremental updates - except for Windows Defender - until they came out in a Service Pack. He said those incremental updates were the cause of most 'instability' OS problems and that by the time they came out in service pack MS had had a chance to fix the things in them that cause the individual upgrades to 'break' other programs or functions.

So now I sit like bird in the wilderness with 72 'important' updates available that I'm ignoring, waiting for Vista SP3. And I'm experiencing 'freeze ups' with greater and greater frequency.

Should I keep waiting, or backup everything, download all the updates, and hope everthing works afterwards?

Any wisdom appreciated...

Although it's not very likely to be related to your freeze up problems.

Kees

as very few problems are associated with regular updates and fixes.

The few problems "caused" almost every time have been shown to have an underlying problem of malware or a physical incompatibility.

Windows Vista is called Windows Vista.

Mark

What makes you say that? I'd like to see some sources on that, because last I checked Microsoft's product support lifecycle page, Vista was still good to go for a couple of years. XP is gasping its last few breaths right now, and good riddance to an OS that should have never been allowed to stick around as long as it did, but Vista is still very much under active support. The only real exception I'm aware of is Internet Explorer, and given the raging security hazard that program is, it's no real loss.

So what are your sources that should be taken over that of Microsoft's own?