All Hell Will Break Loose on April 12th

On April 12, Microsoft Corp. is scheduled to turn on its Automatic Update service, which will deploy the XP Service Pack 2 to all PCs connected to the Internet regardless of whether corporate IT departments or individual PC users have prepared for it. With the upgrade deadline looming, one study shows that the vast majority of companies running XP have actively avoided the upgrade or simply ignored the problem. The study, by AssetMetrix Research Labs of Ottawa, Canada, showed that only 24 percent of Windows XP PCs have been upgraded to SP2.

This one could be bad news for IT departments that have been in denial since last September. The auto-updating will, however, put a strain on LANs and WANs as tens of millions of PCs start downloading hundreds of megabytes of SP2 code apiece. It's not inconceivable that the Internet will dim next week as all this traffic gets pushed around country by country, but the likelihood is the download process itself will take a couple of weeks. During that time, IT department help desks will have to deal with lots of phone calls about slow response times, the need to reboot, "a virus called SP2 just took over my machine" -- you get the idea.

For Microsoft, this is a tough call. Customers are going to be angry in a major way due to the disruption, in spite of all the warnings to be prepared. But after all the dust settles, Microsoft's support job will be considerably easier and the Internet will be a somewhat safer place with millions more hardened and firewall-secured PCs.

Peter S. Kastner