Last weekend I upgraded one of my servers to SP1. Why? Because I've been dying for a fix for a nasty problem. There's a dirty little bug in XP and Win2003. It seems if you connect more than one Firewire drive of the same model, the Firewire driver has a bug and enumerates the two devices as the same device. As a result, I've been connecting all of my disk drives through a slower USB link for months.
SP1 was supposed to fix all of my problems. I installed it and expected Firewire Nirvana. Instead, I got blue screen after blue screen. Thinking the CompUSA drive enclosures I bought were crap (they are, but I expected the electronics to be OK), I bought some really nice enclosures from Frys. No dice. While I'm much happier with my new enclosures, I'm not so happy with all the blue screens. I've uploaded a couple gigs worth of crash dumps to MS.
One chipset driver update and one bios update later, I am having decent luck with all my drives. Let's hope. Oh, and if any of you noticed that UrbanPotato, MohairSofa, SimpleGeek, ShawnBurke, ErickEllis and OceanRookies were offline for most of today, I have a story for that too. It turns out that blue screening your server while it's writing data from a SQL database to an external Firewire drive is a bad idea. It took a six hour chkdsk to clean up the disk, and even then I had to recover poor Shawn's web site from backups.
I guess I can't quit MS yet and start my own ISP.