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Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, and Microsoft has finally released Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP. See CIO, InfoWorld, Engadget and Paul Thurrott for some comments, and fire up Windows Update or Microsoft Update to start the install. This may be the last SP release for the 2001 edition of Windows. SP3 may be enough to keep companies from upgrading their desktops to Windows Vista for the next year or two.

The university’s IT department has posted a reminder message in Pipeline, asking faculty and staff to reboot their office computers at least once a week. Most of these users should shut down their computers before leaving for the weekend.

Older operating systems like Windows 2000 must be rebooted after patches are installed. Some Windows XP and MacOS patches require a reboot after installation.

A weekly reboot is also a good idea for my readers at home. I turn off my home computers whenever I can. It’s an easy way to keep intruders out of my home network.

On February 5 and February 13, I wrote about the changes to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the US and Canada, and how these changes required software patches.

Phil Wainewright writes that last week, Microsoft finished releasing its official patches for DST. According to Mary Jo Foley, a noted IT journalist who has followed Microsoft for years, MS just released the DST patches for Microsoft Dynamics. That product is Microsoft’s entry into the customer relationship management (CRM) field, an industry dominated by smaller vendors like Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Of course, these vendors have patched their web-based on-demand software already, as their programs don’t require a corporate server installation like Microsoft Dynamics does.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes notes that while the DST changes aren’t as bad as Y2K, the conversion will give IT departments headaches for the next few weeks. Managers and technicians are discovering that Microsoft’s patches must be applied in a specific order, or they won’t work correctly.

In the past, Microsoft’s patches have been easier to apply. For most users, Microsoft Update or Windows Update, the built-in patch management systems in Windows, would handle the patching process for Microsoft products.

This time, DST patch management is a colossal mess and Microsoft has dropped the ball. For example, next Monday morning, mainland users who patched their copy of Outlook before their IT staff patched the company’s Exchange server will find their Outlook appointments could be one hour off. It depends on how the user connects to the Exchange server.

While the state of Hawaii does not observe Daylight Savings Time, plenty of companies and employees in the state do business with the mainland. Unpatched versions of Outlook and Exchange may report that conference calls start an hour early or late, for example. Mainland call centers that handle Hawaii-based customers may have similar issues.

Margie Semilof noted that , Shavlik Technology and BigFix customers received their list of approved patches last month, as each company completed their respective tests of the available software patches. Eric Schultze, Shavlik’s chief security architect, said that keeping up with the changing inventory of patches has been a challenge for the firm. Both companies build their own patches for older versions of Windows, including Windows NT 4.0.

Of course, none of these patches address time and clock functions in hardware. Some PDAs and cell phones will need patches, for example. Clocks and watches that synchronize to atomic clocks on the mainland may be one hour off for the four-week period between March 11 and the traditional start of DST, the second Sunday of April or April 8.

In the meantime, some IT administrators will be hoping that the Easter Bunny is carrying software patches in his basket this spring.

Tech: Dvorak devotes another column to his hatred of Microsoft Word. I rarely use the program myself, and agree with him that Word should be scrapped and completely rewritten. Frankly, I get nervous just installing MS Office on a computer these days. The process takes too long, when I include all of the service packs and patches that should be applied to fix Microsoft’s security holes.

What to do? I miss WordPerfect, but I don’t keep it installed. I prefer OpenOffice. It’s free and easy to install. OO does most of what Word can do, and includes a PDF converter. But I do encounter documents that require Microsoft Word for proper formatting, so I keep the free Microsoft Word viewer installed and ready for those misfits. It can print, so I can convert a DOC into PDF format no matter what.

OpenOffice doesn’t have anything like Access, unfortunately. So I go to another machine when I need to use a Microsoft database, which isn’t often. Instead of Outlook, I use Thunderbird, another fast and free wonder that handles e-mail. I’m still looking for a decent event and contact manager, though. When my cell phone contract is up in December, I may get a PDA phone.

Tech: Sharon Weinbar discusses the proliferation of spyware. There’s a brief discussion of Claria, a major Yahoo advertiser. The company earns about US$90M in revenue annually, and uses spyware to display popup ads. Yahoo has only recently included Claria in Yahoo’s spyware block software. You have 20 minutes to patch your unprotected PC before something infects it.