OT: SP2 and AMD don't mix..

[David E. Gervais]

This info found on a technology report site..

"Regarding Boot errors.. Microsoft advises AMD Users to remove SP2 altogether. AMD also recommends that people affected by the problem do so."

This regarding a "freeze on bootup" error that apears to be linked to something called a DEP handler that is used by AMD processors.

Since installing SP2 my computer has been 'freezing' on bootup and I had to boot in safe mode then reboot in order to get my computer up and running.

I just thought I'd share this info with you good people. In case you find yourself with similar problems.

Cheers!

... David takes a deep breath and dives into the world of reformating and reinstalling winXP.. He'll be back, count on it.

[Unknown_Enemy]

I saw that from our support team, it was something only with opteron processors, not with xp or barton AMD procs.

[David E. Gervais]

WinXP reinstalled once again, this time with SP1 and driver updates. Everything seems fine, I'll keep my fingers crossed just to be safe.

Cheers!

[DeadZone]

Well, my SP2 & AMD appear to be enjoying each others company rather nicely
In fact, my PC has been running much better since SP2, which leads me to be worried
I mean... Microsoft software making things go faster... something aint right

[bearclaw]

I had a tech support job where someone had installed SP2 and once complete, everytime they booted up, it would reach a certain point and restart itself. Over and over and over.

After quite a bit of troubleshooting and searching through, I had to install WinXP over top and then everything worked fine. SP2 is still installed but now it's working just fine. This is on a Pentium machine so it's most likely not related, but thought it might be handy for people to know about.

[CNCRaymond]

ZDNet has a blog on the Windows XP service pack 2 issue. Now everytime I see anything called a blog I have to just laugh. How trendy is ZDNet trying to be? It is a freaking webpage with comments. It has been around for years. Anyway, there is the issue with one DVD program. That is it. I've not seen any issues after installing SP2 on 10 systems, 3 of them AMD64.

According to a recently published article in Microsoft’s on-line Knowledge Base (KB), the hardware-enforced "no-execute" (NX) buffer-overflow protection that SP2 introduced to Windows XP – known as Data Execution Prevention (DEP) – has caught its first offender and it’s a legitimate piece of software (a driver, in this case). Though such incompatibilities weren’t unexpected and can usually be overcome (see below), the resulting behavior on afflicted systems goes a bit beyond what Microsoft says will happen if a DEP violation is detected and, worse, the only guaranteed fix in this case is to uninstall SP2.

And you don't have to uninstall SP2. That would be a big waste of time, and could cause more problems. Just set DEP to ingnore the DVD program. Simple enough.

From the AMDzone.com

[minipol]

Pff so the guy installed it on 3 amd systems and then concludes there is no problem? Really. What a joke.
Not installing SP2 until the quircks are out is better or switching to another OS for instance win2000 or linux

[Thermodyne]

Some AMD systems will need a bios flash to fix some microcode that hangs up on XPsp2. I have not seen a list of systems yet. Also, some VIA and SIS chipset P3 and P4 Boards need flashes.