XP SP2 other than windows update

Michel Py michel at arneill-py.sacramento.ca.us
Thu Sep 2 04:01:19 UTC 2004


> Steven Susbauer wrote:
> I hadn't heard they were keeping it off akamai.

Me neither. Although I had it for a while I downloaded it from the
Microsoft web site again twice today (did not bother to look where it
resolved), from home and office, and it came each time in less than 15
minutes for the full network install file. Maybe there's something wrong
with the incremental download (which I never use, even for home) but the
full download worked full speed for me each and every time I tried.


> I have heard they're asking ISP's not to mirror it (and any
> other mirrors), and have shut down bittorrent downloads.
> That's understandable as they would be blamed if someone
> downloaded a compromised version (strange how they didn't
> mind Sp1 mirroring...).

I can understand whu also, but it's all over eDonkey though and a little
bird has emailed me several working bittorents for it (don't ask me even
privately).

Purely for educational purposes, I connected to eDonkey and started to
download it about an hour ago. Currently I am downloading at
73kBytes/sec from 11 simultaneous sources out of 596 possible ones.
http://home.pacbell.net/arn-py/photos/sp2.JPG
It's not nearly as fast as downloading directly from Microsoft/Akamai
though, but don't tell me that it's hard to get. When the download
completes I will do a binary comparison with the one I downloaded from
M$. Stay tuned.

Bottom line: If you have a dial-up modem it does not matter where you
get it from as it will take all night anyway, so get it from Microsoft
there are less unknowns about the authenticity. If you have broadband,
bittorrents gets nuked all the time and eDonkey is not as fast as
Akamai, so also get it from Microsoft also.

Michel.




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