Monday, August 9, 2004
Service Pack 2 For Windows XP Coming To A PC Near You
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "NEWS" @ 11:00 AM
The long awaited Service Pack 2 for Windows XP will be on your XP based PC soon. Beta testers and subscribers to MSDN may already have it. Microsoft will put it on the Windows Update site and push it out via Automatic Updates in the coming days and weeks.
I mainly wanted to alert you to a few changes in SP2 that will apply to mobile device users that use ActiveSync. By default, XP now enables the "Windows Firewall" which replaces the anemic "Internet Connection Firewall" that came with XP in 2001. You will need to create two exceptions in the new Windows Firewall for ActiveSync, but XP should help you do this with relative ease.
After your initial boot after SP2 has installed, a 24 minute install process on my 1.2GHz laptop and a nearly 5 minute boot as the install finished up, you'll be welcomed with the following dialog box:
Figure 1: Tell XP to unblock the Connection Manager, which is an ActiveSync component.
When you initially dock your Pocket PC, you will then be welcomed by the dialog box in figure 2:
Figure 2: Tell XP to unblock ActiveSync itself.
If, for some reason, the new Windows Firewall doesn't prompt you, you can manually create exceptions by going into the XP control panel, select the Windows Firewall, select the Exceptions tab and select the following two applications:
Connection Manager: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ActiveSync\wcescomm.exe
ActiveSync: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ActiveSync\WCESMgr.exe
Unless you really know what you are doing, you should enable the new Windows Firewall. It doesn't block file and printer sharing on local networks like many of us have at home like its predecessor did, and it is much more user friendly when it comes to blocking/unblocking and setting up exceptions. Even though I am behind a NAT router at home and have IP addresses that aren't accessible from the outside, I have chosen to enable the Windows Firewall as an extra measure of protection, something I didn't do with the old Internet Connection Firewall because of the problems it caused.
I mainly wanted to alert you to a few changes in SP2 that will apply to mobile device users that use ActiveSync. By default, XP now enables the "Windows Firewall" which replaces the anemic "Internet Connection Firewall" that came with XP in 2001. You will need to create two exceptions in the new Windows Firewall for ActiveSync, but XP should help you do this with relative ease.
After your initial boot after SP2 has installed, a 24 minute install process on my 1.2GHz laptop and a nearly 5 minute boot as the install finished up, you'll be welcomed with the following dialog box:
Figure 1: Tell XP to unblock the Connection Manager, which is an ActiveSync component.
When you initially dock your Pocket PC, you will then be welcomed by the dialog box in figure 2:
Figure 2: Tell XP to unblock ActiveSync itself.
If, for some reason, the new Windows Firewall doesn't prompt you, you can manually create exceptions by going into the XP control panel, select the Windows Firewall, select the Exceptions tab and select the following two applications:
Connection Manager: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ActiveSync\wcescomm.exe
ActiveSync: C:\Program Files\Microsoft ActiveSync\WCESMgr.exe
Unless you really know what you are doing, you should enable the new Windows Firewall. It doesn't block file and printer sharing on local networks like many of us have at home like its predecessor did, and it is much more user friendly when it comes to blocking/unblocking and setting up exceptions. Even though I am behind a NAT router at home and have IP addresses that aren't accessible from the outside, I have chosen to enable the Windows Firewall as an extra measure of protection, something I didn't do with the old Internet Connection Firewall because of the problems it caused.
