Now that Service Pack 2 is available for Windows XP Home and Windows XP Pro, webDotWiz is awaiting lots of weeping and gnashing of teeth to come from all directions. The first people to complain will be those who persist in attempting to steal personal details from our computers under the guise of marketing and advertising. The other group will be those XP owners who have repeatedly ignored the advice to update the security of their computers by having antivirus software and the latest security fixes for Windows.

It's the second group whom Microsoft have been targetting and making it as convenient as possible to keep their systems secure. Thus if you still haven't ordered the free Windows Security Update CD from February of this year, do so now. The rest of us have, and we're sick of junk email that's still propagating around the Net because of those who failed to update XP nearly eighteen months ago. End of rant.

The Security Update CD turns on Automatic Notification of Windows Updates so you've probably had the update balloon popping up when you've gone online. If you've visited the Update site, you would have seen that Service Pack 2 is about 250Mb in size so it's not practical to download and install unless you're on broadband. To that end, we'll have to wait a bit until there's a page from which to order the free CD. Another alternative may be that the Service Pack will be allowed distribution via the cover CD on some monthly computer magazines.

There are a couple of ways in which Service Pack 2 might affect you. Firstly, if you participate in multi-player games on the Net, your game may no longer work or may behave differently because of XP's new firewall. Besides some games, there are other programs which have been taking some shortcuts when communicating across the Net so check the Programs That May Behave Differently and Some Programs Seem to Stop Working pages for more information.

For those on broadband in particular, the new XP firewall becomes active as soon as Windows starts loading to protect against any attacks. This is in contrast to software firewalls that some of you may currently use - they only become active when they can load after Windows has.

Free popup blockers have been available for some months, either through the free MSN toolbar or installing version 6.2 of MSN Messenger. Internet Explore will have one built in. As well, expect some sites to behave differently, especially those who have taken advantage of being able to open browser windows that are off-screen or too small to see. All browser windows will have the status bar turned on and Internet Explorer won't load a browser window outside the viewable area of the screen.

So while you wait for news on where to order the Service Pack 2 CD, check you've got the Security Update CD ordered and installed, your antivirus protection is up to date, automatic notification of updates is turned on, you've for one of the free popup blockers installed, and you've read the Service Pack 2 articles in this week's list of sites.