XP Service Pack 2 Bomb

[Astronouth7303]

Originally Posted by MikeDubreuil

It should be noted that the article claims that if you have an illegal copy of Windows your boot partition will be overwritten with garbage data. This is not the same as destroying hardware.

To the average consumer their computer is unusable, but to a skilled technician the data can be restored and a new operating system can be re-installed.

Yes, quite so.

Over writing the MBR (Master Boot Record) would just render the drive unbootable, meaning that if you have another harddrive with a bootable OS on it, you just swap their boot order. If not, just stick it in a working computer. ('skilled technician' is a little excessive, I could walk you through the trans-plant)

to repeat: All your files would still be there, but the motherboard doesn't know where the OS is.

(ps- has anyone found an article written by someone else that says the same thing? it wouldn't surprise me if this was a hoax.)

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Originally Posted by JosephM

While true that OSX has had some bugs, the fixes were released fast and included other improvements, compared to just ONE service pack for XP so far.

A service pack is a big change, not a bug fix. It's a version increment. Software has been known to fail with a different service pack. Frequently, programs say "for Windows XP SP1" or whatever is apropriate.