Failed XP Upgrade Downs 60,000 UK Gov't PCs

Found on eWEEK on Saturday, 27 November 2004
Browse Software

Most of the desktop computers in the UK's Department for Work and Pensions were paralyzed for four days on Monday, when a failed upgrade took them offline. The outage, covering 75 percent to 80 percent of the DWP's 80,000 PCs, is one of the largest in the UK government's not entirely impressive IT history.

According to one, a limited network upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP was taking place, but instead of this taking place on only a small number of the target machines, all the clients connected to the network received a partial, but fatal, "upgrade."

Unfortunately the request was made to apply it live and it was rolled out across the estate, which hit around 80 percent of the Win2K desktops. This patch caused the desktops to BSOD and made recovery rather tricky as they couldn't boot to pick any further patches or recalls.

Lesson learned? I still wonder why anybody would like to upgrade (better downgrade) from W2k to XP. I've heard of more problems with XP. Plus, you receive a lot of new "features", such as product activation. For a gaming system, XP might be ok. But if you need a stable Windows, use W2k.