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September 21, 1998

NT Fixes To Ship

Microsoft says Service Pack 4 for NT 4.0 to address memory leaks, security issues

By Stuart J. Johnston

icrosoft's long-awaited bug- fix release for Windows NT 4.0 will ship within the next few weeks, according to company president Steve Ballmer. The news has at least one NT 4.0 user rejoicing.

"Hallelujah," says Mark Resh, CIO at Standard Forms Inc., a major forms and office-supplies dealer in New York. Although no bugs are crippling Resh's IT group or his users, Resh's team has been coping with a number of minor annoyances that he expects Microsoft's Service Pack 4 of NT 4.0 to fix.

Resh was just one of several users at Microsoft's Business Applications Conference in Las Vegas on Sept. 10 who complained about NT 4.0's instability when compared with earlier NT versions.

Ballmer disclosed the news about SP4's impending release at the conference. He says SP4 will fix some 1,200 bugs and 20 so-called memory leaks--problems that cause the operating system to not free up memory when not in use. When enough memory leaks occur, the system runs out of memory and refuses to load programs or crashes.

In addition, SP4 upgrades NT 4.0 so it is completely year 2000 compliant, said Ballmer. It also contains Internet security fixes that Microsoft has developed in recent months, as well as "enhanced security components," Ballmer said, although he would not elaborate.

"There are some TCP/IP fixes that are important to us since we're mostly running on TCP/IP," says Resh. Standard Forms is running 35 U.S. sites, with heavy NT Server 4.0 usage and more than 400 desktops running NT Workstation 4.0. Resh says his company will probably deploy SP4 soon after the fix comes out.

"The big goal for us with NT 5.0 [which is still eight to 12 months away from shipping] is to keep service packs coming on a more regular basis than before," says Ballmer. NT 4.0 was released on July 30, 1996; there have been three service packs since its release.

Resh is philosophical about the attention SP4 has attracted, noting that all systems vendors periodically send service packs out. "If somebody released a perfect product," he says with a laugh, "there would be no more [need for] upgrades."