Datasheet

Chapter 1
Getting and Installing SP1
As you’ve already read, you can get an awful lot of the features ascribed to R2 free of charge; just
install SP1. And while I’m sure that many of you have already installed SP1, I also know that unfor-
tunately some of you have been waiting to take the plunge. (And yes, I additionally know that it’s
more than a year since SP1’s release—but I’m constantly amazed when I visit clients that so many
of them are still leery of SP1. Install it, I say!)
In this chapter, I’ll try to eliminate one of the reasons for the holdouts not to install SP1: the
fear that installing SP1 will be difficult. You’ll learn where to get SP1, how to install it, how to pre-
install when creating new 2003 servers, and—just in case!—how to uninstall it. (Not that I’ve ever
needed to.)
Do I Have SP1 Already?
As you’re about to read, Microsoft’s got a couple of systems in place that may have installed SP1
on your server so quietly that you may not have noticed that you have SP1. So here’s a pretty reliable
way to find out whether you’re running the original year-2003 version of Windows Server 2003—
the Release To Manufacturing or RTM version—or 2003 with SP1 installed.
Whenever Microsoft ships an operating system, they set the time and date of almost all of that
OS’s files to some particular date. They time-and-date stamped the RTM files as March 25, 2003,
and the SP1 files as March 25, 2005 . So find out your system files’ dates like so:
1.
Open a command prompt.
2.
Type dir %windir%\notepad.exe and press Enter.
3. The date on the Notepad file will indicate whether you’re RTM or SP1.
There’s another just-as-easy way: right-click the My Computer icon, and choose Properties.
Under the text System in the resulting page, you’ll see the name of your operating system. If you
see the line “Service Pack 1” under the OS’s name, then you’ve got SP1; if you don’t see any refer-
ences to service packs, then you’re probably RTM. I say “probably” and gave you two ways to fig-
ure out your SP level—there are others, like looking at Help/About on most Windows utilities—
but occasionally I need more than one “corroborating witness,” as sometimes I’ll be working at a
client’s machine trying to fix something, and the client doesn’t tell me that the reason the server is
messed up is that the client started installing SP1, decided to reboot in mid-stream, and now things
aren’t working out the way the client would have preferred.
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