Ensight – Jeremy Wright

This morning’s mother of all surprises: Certain apps don’t work with XP SP2! Microsoft has released a list of 50 apps (and counting) that do not function correctly with XP SP2. Many of these do have updates from the vendors already. Some don’t. For some, the issues affected are very minor or contain workarounds.

This one hit close to home, as recently a game I’ve become addicted to, City of Heroes, warned it’s users not to upgrade to XP SP2 because the game would cease to function. Wonderful. That’s just what we need. People not updating their PC’s because of games…

To me this was incredibly humorous. The game came out in April. Just weeks before XP SP2 Release Candidate 2 came out. The developers have had all the time in the world to ensure the game worked (it was mainly just standardly blocked ports that weren’t working, which is a big deal with an online-only game).

But, still, the fact that the developers would make this recommendation flat out (instead of saying “if you want to play this game, either give us 3 days, or turn off the firewall) really irked me. It’s not like most of their users had it yet anyways (unless they chose to go out and download it, since very few users have received it via Automatic Updates yet). They could have provided a workaround, they could have said turn off the firewall… Heck, they could have released a registry hack (honestly, it was that simple). But they didn’t. They said not to install the update.

I’m sure there were reasons (not wanting to support users who did stuff wrong) that they didn’t want to officially support SP2 (testing, probably). However, the patch for the game was released 2 days after the SP became public. And yet the notice still sits there on their website. Gah. I’m easily annoyed today. I don’t think I slept enough last night. I was probably playing City of Heroes