Win xp - SP2 or SP3?

Hi all,

I heard that SP3 does increase the speed of win xp. However, it may be incompatible with some existing softwares. Some even call it a crap!
http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/01/02/windows-xp-service-pack-3-review-after-usage/

(Just find a similar post
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=76864#859975)

Are you still using SP2?

Thanks in advance

I switched to SP3 -- After all, there are a ton of security fixes rolled into the servicepack, and staying behind will leave you (more) vulnerable to exploits...

so far, I haven't seen SP3 breaking anything after upgrading a few dozen of them at the office.

no problems here on either of our two machines.

No problems here either.

My machine at work upgraded to SP3 (my home one already had, without apparent issues), and Adobe Framemaker 7.1 (not the latest version of the software) stopped working. Like, at all. It's now unsupported by Adobe, so my only option was to roll back to SP2.

Also, we use the "Address Toolbar" regularly at work on our machines. SP3 - for whatever sad rationalisation Microsoft feels it needs to come up with - removes this toolbar as an option. There are workarounds (involving replacig a .dll with an SP2 version), but it's an unexpected pain.

Apart from those issues though, I've not noticed anything major. Yet.

The only issue I have is that WinXP SP3 is 10-15% faster than Vista SP1 in terms of performance.

I've not had any problems with SP3 on the two PCs I installed it on.

I have it on both my XP systems and had no problems at all.

So a few people called it crap - so what? The anti-Microsoft brigade would still throw an eppy if Microsoft were giving away free money.

i think im on sp3 now
it downloaded, but i chose not to install right away due to the reboot cos i was in the middle of something.
then about a week later 'something' updated itself offline and rebooted the pc in the middle of the night waking me up after i fell asleep watching a dvd in bed, so im assuming it was sp3 thinking i had abandoned it (and without knowing its dl size that and red vs blue might explain why ive had next to no mb left on my mobile tarrif)

SP3 is only 60MB or so (if you get it from Windows Update).

so its probably the whole serise* streaming of rvb that killed my 3gb this month then ;)

*found some stream that was a solid 2 hours long which was more handy than clicking each episode in turn

I've had network issues after upgrading, probably due to the drivers being naff in the first place
otherwise, sp3 is fine. :-)

I installed SP3 and the next day I won the lottery and am currently on the Bahamas writing this to you all from my yacht.

Haha!!!

Other than that I see no difference between SP2 and SP3 but I am probably not supposed to.

Yeah. My D-link card stopped working when I switched to SP3. A driver update fixed it, but getting a D-link driver upgrade off the Internet, without a working NIC is a bit of a trick.

Other than that, no problems here.

Same with my dad's wireless d-link card. Fixed it after a bit of hassle (restored a dll from SystemRestore)

My desktop won't run the SP3 upgrade - it gets to checking/writing registry info and then bails out with an error message and then resets everything back to the way it was before.

My laptop accepted it just fine though. I've not noticed any difference tbh.

Had no problems so far with Windows XP Pro with SP3 so far except for 1 small thing, internet sharing. In my case I use a server with Windows XP Pro with SP3 with internet sharing activated and from that server to other computers in the network. Only trouble is that a computer with Vista installed with the latest updates has troubles detecting the shared internet connection.

It's more of a combination of XP and Vista in my case.

I solved it by restoring Vista to a previous update and disabling updates temporary until this is solved.

Should be fixed after some newer updates on XP I hope.

Thank you for your comments,
xlsior,AdrianT,John J.,LineOf7s,Grisu,puki,GfK,
Ginger Tea,Foppy,FlameDuck,Grey Alien,iprice,Digital Anime

After reading above, I installed sp3 3 days ago and luckily nothing bad happened so far.
:D

I default to installing the sp3 version of XP when I reformat a customer's PC. Not had any complaints, thus far. I've certainly not stumbled across any compatability issues.

Nobody has asked me to restore a PC with Vista yet. Whether this means that Vista systems aren't failing quite so badly as XP ones, which usually come to me riddled with spyware, registry errors and in general poor order, I don't know. Too early to tell, perhaps.

I may end up with a swathe of crumpled Vista systems at some point. I dearly hope not.

Acer Aspire One running here with XP SP3, no blue screens yet!

Thank you, VinylPusher and xmlspy.
:D

I heard XP 0 is the best way to have major speed increes.

but also a chese of for hacker rats.

but if you offline and only use office.. therse no need for sp :)


Installing XP on customer pc.. its a verry big shame..
they shold use Vista.. :)

Hmm, well I had one prob with SP3 this weekend. I got handed a PC with a broken HD someone wanted me to recover files from and possibly recover the HD too. it was a DELL with a bunch of intel components and radeon X300. Anyway, I thought I'd install SP3 straight after the XP+SP1 dvd.

After that Auto updates stopped working, so I uninstalled it, installed the 90 or so fixes and updates since SP1 and then reinstalled SP3. Windows update worked fine after and updated windows and Office as expected.

Must have been some required dependency it needed, got a feeling it was pne of the interim windows update update utils that checks WGA was skipped and messed the whole thing up.

Spoke too soon.

Discovered today that the Nvidia drivers for my GeForce2 MX400 don't like SP3 at all. It works, but there's screen-wide graphics corruption going on. Had to go back to SP2.

Its an old card with old drivers (but the newest available), to be fair.