Same here....

I'm a volunteer at a charitable organisation, and as such, hardware upgrades in must be strictly warranted on an individual basis. Last patch Wednesday half of our stock, about ten machines, all of them P3's with 256 Meg of RAM found themselves stuffed, svchost chewing up all processor time and RAM.

Simply writing off anything that isn't a Pentium 4 with a couple of gigs of RAM isn't acceptable. Whilst I appreciate that this getting close to a minimum practical spec, suggestions that we thow away these systems are just not going to cut the mustard.

In our case disabling the update agent did the trick. In any event, in my opinion updates should be quarantined prior to installation. After all, if their is a problem, let someone else take the pain, or at least, a test PC if there is one available.

Microsofts failure to recognise that the problem even exists must surely be affecting some of their governmental customers, as some of these operate under the same constraints on resources we do...... Nice one Redmond, what a good advert for upgrading to Vista. If we can't run XP, how the heck are we going to run Vista.

Utterly unacceptable.