Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 finally went official yesterday, after several weird days where it wasn't official, but you could get it through the various links being assembled on the Microsoft site and elsewhere. The appearance of SP1 in the "new downloads" section of microsoft.com yesterday seems to have been a placeholder for the forthcoming SP2 link, and the official front door for all things SP2 is now here.

So far, whether you have a good experience with the fix seems to depend on where you're sitting. The Register has heard from quite a few happy campers, and a couple of BSOD victims so far. It's too early to be able to establish much in the way of patterns for breakages, but there seem to be at least two areas where SP2 generates identifiable problems - some portables, and as regards recent hotfixes.

On some portables SP2 seems to be messing up hibernation. You can hibernate a session once, but an attempt to do so a second time results in the system freezing at the "preparing to hibernate" message. This has affected some readers, and is also covered in a current Betanews discussion thread.

The hotfix problem could be more worrying though. Also in the Betanews thread, a contributor notes that running the Hotfix Checker after applying SP2 returns errors for four security hotfixes for IIS 5. Presumably these have to be reapplied, quite a few people won't do this unless somebody tells them to, and it sounds kind of similar to what we were saying here earlier this week. ®