From: "Geo." 

"Mike N."  wrote in message
news:t05ts258qrp4ptp6a1c89ep5i7c3tj29jc{at}4ax.com...

>  I guess it just seems worse that it is because I've never actually had to
> roll back anything in Windows.

I was a beta for all the service packs from the beginning up thru W2Ksp4. I
even ran them on production machines after initial testing. The procedure
was backup to tape, update and pray, anything fails to work quickly restore
the OS partition from tape.

Machines can be live during the backup (at least mine could) then it takes
about 5 minutes to apply the update and reboot and if it's no good it takes
about 20 minutes to restore and reboot. Less than an hour. I would do this
on a small server (usually the one with nthelp on it) then when the SP got
to the point where it was stable and worked well on that server I would
pick the next biggest and usually from there on out I would have no
problem.

The nice thing about being in the beta for SP's was that all the bugs that
affected me would get fixed quickly so I would rarely have a problem with
the release version of the SP. If you can clone the machine, do it and use
it as a beta and help the authors fix the problems.

Geo.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5