Well, I have finally decided to live on the dangerous edge and upgrade my professional laptop to Windows XP Service Pack 2. (Yeah I know... although I run full linux at home, I still carry around a windows machine. mea maxima culpa).
Many posts around the blogosphere will tell you not to upgrade, because somewhere in the fine print, Micro$oft asks you to agree that they can scan everything you have on your computer and eventually disable it. Uck!
Anyways, I did upgrade, and although I haven't noticed any of the new features yet, I did notice that my Wi-Fi icon and applet have changed (looks better), and that there is a new firewall feature (reminds me of what ZoneAlarm Pro used to behave). I suppose it blocks any suspicious outgoing traffic, and the first thing Microsoft did, of couse, was to challenge the competition to its own built-in IM client...
The screenshot below shows you it doesn't like Skype and Trillian. (I haven't had any other alert yet, so the coincidence is disturbing...).
PS: other new stuff: it seems WindowsUpdate now offers me to download WindowsMedia Player 10. Who cares? I use Winamp, Quicktime, iTunes and VideoLan.
I also noticed they have a new popup blocker with a little frame that shows on top of the browser. Hey, Firefox has being doing this for a long time now!