Deploy XP SP3 via WSUS

[Kyle]

As of yet i have not deployed XP SP3 via WSUS. I have got to re-image a lot of PC's this summer and I plan to do some of them by putting SP3 on the image. But I will have over half the clients still without SP3.

Has anyone deployed SP3 via WSUS?

My main question is time it takes to install.

Once the client picks it up how long does it take the SP to install?
Does it run in the background not really affecting the user?
Does it then prompt the user to reboot or does it take its settings from GPO which in our case waits for a manual reboot?
Does it have a major impact on the network ( say if it was deployed to 100 clients in one go?)

[FN-GM]

The client will blue screen if a user forces ashutdown while it is installing.

[srochford]

Has anyone deployed SP3 via WSUS?

Yes

My main question is time it takes to install.
Once the client picks it up how long does it take the SP to install?
Does it run in the background not really affecting the user?
Does it then prompt the user to reboot or does it take its settings from GPO which in our case waits for a manual reboot?
Does it have a major impact on the network ( say if it was deployed to 100 clients in one go?)

This is a real "piece of string" type question :-)

It depends on the spec of the machine. On a core 2 Duo with 2Gb RAM it takes <20 minutes from starting to install to ready to reboot. On a 1.7GHz Celeron with 256Mb of RAM it takes more than an hour.

It does run in the background (standard yellow shield with updates being installed at the specified time - will prompt when it's ready to reboot in the normal way for updates which need a reboot and it won't reboot automatically if you tell it not to.
No real impact on network - BITS is designed to be nice to the network; it could take days for all the machines to download the SP but it doesn't matter - the update client won't try to install it until it's completely downloaded.

We started pushing it out to just a few machines then adding blocks of 50 and so on and it's now going out everywhere. So far, there have been no problems (what's the smiley for "touch wood" :-))

[cookie_monster]

Unlike SP2 SP3 really doesn't contain many improved security features so unless you need one of the new SP3 specific features e.g. Network Access Protection i'd stick to rolling it out to new images only (at least for now) as it's no more secure than a fully patched SP2 box.

As Steve says on anything < 2GHz expect it to take a long time, with the intelligent updater it souldn't take as long to install on a fully patched SP2 box.

[KarlGoddard]

were rolling it out on our machine images. The images need updating this time of year so it's simpler to incorporate it into our base images.

[rhyds]

We did deploy SP3 via WSUS here but have declined it for now as some of our systems really didn't take to it well.

[Michael]

I'm in the process of re-imaging one by one, because as already mentioned, SP3 primarily is just bug fixes. I created a new slipstreamed SP3 install (which always works better) with all existing and new applications on the same image.

XP SP2 and XP SP3 workstations will work happily together. For the time it would take me to deploy XP SP3 I am restoring 15GB images locally through an external hard drive. The advantage here is that it doesn't create a lot of network traffic yet I get the results I expect as I have tested the image again and again

[Maximus]

I've been deploying SP3 via WSUS with mixed results. Its installed without problem on all our machines except for our newer RM Laptops! For some reason RM Mobile One Laptops just won't install SP3 via WSUS. Has anyone else had this problem and if so do they have a fix / work around?