Building your own XP Service Pack 4

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	TOP STORY Building your own XP Service Pack 4
	By Susan Bradley Starting today, Windows XP users will have 860 more days of official Microsoft support — and on every one of those days, many of those users will continue to run the operating system that just won’t die. Want to extend the life of your Windows XP Service Pack 3 as long as possible? You can do so by installing Microsoft hotfixes as needed.

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The full text of this column is posted at windowssecrets.com/top-story/building-your-own-xp-service-pack-4/ (opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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Susan, there is a typo in the url of your link: there is a space inserted between the “4” and the “/”.

I think it should be http://windowssecrets.com/top-story/building-your-own-xp-service-pack-4/.

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Susan, I am getting ready to migrate and thought your article would tel me how to make a service pack. I have no interest in these hotfixes, BUT, there are lots of valid updates since SP3 (BTW, i bought the SP3 update CD from Microsoft for about $5.) It’s just the updates since the SP3 update that take a while.

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Hi,
I’m confused re the numbner of articles about Win XP …. I have not used an XP OS machine in at least 4 years … If the user base of the newsletter is mainly XP users then I think I have signed up for the wrong newsletter. I have nothing against XP … but every time I see an article on XP in your feed. …its one less article I will read …. As I said … have nothing against XP … but if the user base is that large maybe you should have a separate newsletter dedicated to XP …. Articles on XP give me less incentive to support your newsletter because it is not concentrating on the leading edge of the Windows OS … which I am interested in. I am not angry just confused as to why you spend so much time on an outdated OS … next thing yoiu know there might be an article on Win 98 and that would do it for me.

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Thank you for still paying attention to Windows XP. My old PC died and I purchased a 3.2 mHz 32-bit Windows 7 PC with 2 GB of memory. I struggled an entire week with it; I could not find things, and my beloved paid programs did not work on it, like my wav editor. I took it back to my builder and had Windows 7 removed and went back to Windows XP, and I am delighted now. It was a struggle to find the stereo mix and inputs, they hid them very well. The powers that be just want you to surf the web, email, move pictures, text message, and buy things. From what I have seen Windows 8 will be nothing but a glorified touch screen smart phone. I intend to keep Windows XP forever, whether it is supported or not. I also have a Dumb Phone, it just makes calls. There are still a lot of us out here.

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Yes, I agree, please give us Windows XP users a separate newsletter for the best OS that will never die. I recently had a minor procedure done in the operating room of a hospital, and guess what OS was displayed on the start screen of the monitors; it was not Vista or Windows 7. Everywhere I go, hospitals, auto parts stores, income tax places, they use Windows XP. Over 60% of the world is Windows XP . . . “outdated” indeed.

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Susan, are you aware of the work done by RyanVM, User_Hidden, and many others who are providing updates/addons to WinXP, IE, Win Media Player and other software “bits and pieces”?
You might like to have a look at http://www.wincert.net/forum/index.php?/topic/7118-addon-xpsp3-qfe-updatepack-for-windows-xp-post-sp3-20111110/ which is a cumulative update, currently up to November 10,2011. This link also will lead to RyanVM.net, where there is extensive cross-referencing to the other “bits and pieces”. I am in the process of preparing an installation disk based on the updates, but I haven’t figured out yet how to incorporate my updated driver files.

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Wrong, some of us have both!

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I also thought this was an article about slip-streamming an installation CD. That would be useful.

Suppose I have an XP computer that I have been updating regularly, should I apply these HotFixes?

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TomLawell! What’s wrong and how? Both what?

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Jamboe – we will be giving articles for both Windows 7 (and upcoming Windows 8) as well as XP but, I’ll be honest I still see enough XP being used that we would be remiss (and quite frankly blind and stupid) to turn our backs on XP. Windows 98 is not longer a supported – nor supportable – platform. Having an article about Windows XP is just being realistic to the marketplace of real users.

Don’t be confused, just look around the average user base. It’s a mix of Windows 7 and XP.

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Susan:

While your article is helpful And full of excellent advice, I am very diasappointed by the misleading title. ” Building your own XP SP 4″. If you were publishing a how to guide to actually build a roll up that a user could use to update a fresh XP SP-3 install with all necessary updates since SP 3 released through to a certain date in present, this would have been wonderful (and this is what the subject of the article misleadingly promised.)

Please consider that many readers are tired of misleading advertizements, Mag articles, etc. I do not read tabloids for this specific reason. Please don’t let your excellent advice get classified as a tabloid article.

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I too thought from its title that this article would tell me how to make an XP installation CD with all the hotfixes since SP3 slipstreamed in. Not remotely what we got. How misleading and how very disappointing.

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But then, it occurred to me that the procedure hasn’t changed any, so why restate it? Simply use your existing slipstream disk ( you do have one, don’t you?), add the updates and fixes you want to make a permanent part of your ultimate rebuild disk, and burn away using the same tools you used in the past. No big deal people! Kinda ‘grasp of the obvious’ to me. So Susan, keep up the good work as long as some users still hang on to XP. I’m one of them.

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http://lifehacker.com/386526/slipstream-service-pack-3-into-your-windows-xp-installation-cd There’s lots of locations for how to build your own slipstream media. It’s not new info. Not to mention, not everyone has media to build their own slipstream. Since Microsoft will not be releasing a sp4, these are truly hotfixes post sp3.

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I’m an technical services administrator for a small company (less than 150 PCs) most of which will continue to use XP Pro SP3 until the workstations fail completely. This will be most likely well after Microsoft’s end-of-life for XP. I’ve tried to download the individual critical updates from Microsoft but they apparently throttle back the bandwidth to this web site so dramatically that even with a T3 connection its painfully slow. I’ve given up on saving WCUs for future XP reinstallations using this option.
Do you know of a legitimate method that I can use to download or purchase an optical disc that contains all the security updates that have been released since Service Pack 3? I have approximately 10 different Gateway and Dell models currently running XP SP3 that would make it extremely difficult to create a SP4 image for each model and application combination. (To be clear, those 10 different models relate to approximately 80 different workstations so this is not a trivial task.)

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Susan,
Here’s one for everybody running Win7/8 and XP on their LANs…
If you want your XP machine to show up in Win7/8’s Network Map
e.g. using the See full map link in 7’s Network and Sharing Center
(I haven’t tried 8 yet… maybe when they issue SP1 for it, I’ll buy a copy),
needed is the Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) responder for XP (KB922120).

The download link in that KB article will get you v5, which will fix XP SP2.
But MS forgot to put it in the service pack 3 rollup, so you have to request the hotfix to get v6, which will install on SP3.
HotFix Request for SP3

Funny thing… in the response email they show that hotfix being part of SP4.

31059-Win7-NetworkMap-Without-XP-LLTD
Anyway… above is what a 7+XP LAN looked like before the hotfix…

31060-Win7-NetworkMap-With-XP-LLTD
and the same LAN immediately after applying the hotfix to its XP SP3 machines.

Too bad 7’s mapper can’t tell when ports belong to the same switch.
(The top 2 are the same switch, and the bottom 2 are the same switch.)

The source is at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463094
But I guess there’s some editing needed in the osl-linux.c file.
That’s probably why LLTD responders haven’t found their way into every distro’s package repo’s.

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