I am one guy who has always beleaved that when MS made XPsp2 they raised the standards for them selves. the package was just too good for their own good.
When Sp3 came out I didnt hesitate to download it and what did I get? The first thing that i noticed was I could no longer use remote desktop. i'm sure this has since been rectified in RC2 but it realy turned me off. I never realised any gains in the SP.
Still on the subject I found Adrian Kingsley-Hughes' blog titled ' XP SP3 performance gains - Nothing to write home about' interesting
He wrote:
read the rest of the blog here

I thought it was rather funny to hear that XP actually having a service pack release AFTER Vista has been out for over a year now. It almost seems detrimental to see how Microsoft still has a stake in XP users when trying to get everyone to go over to their newer operating system.

Note: I am not a fan of Vista.

I wonder if this update will actually change much of anything, if at all, on the normal, everyday user. Windows Update is always full of hotfixes and patches that covers exploits, bugs, and what-have-you that most people don't even encounter on a daily basis. I am actually an XP user that, after installing SP2, have not found the need and consequently disabled Windows Update and the service itself to prevent any unnecessary (and un-acknowledged) downloads from the Microsoft server. (I also keep Windows Update disabled for other, less legal reasons. ) So far, I have no reason to update anything past SP2 as everything I've done or wanted to accomplish has gone without too much hassle.

Looking at the overview and description of what SP3 adds to the table, it seems like something that I can skip. I'm already hearing stories about not having much of an impact on system performance... and really, there can't be much since it's an upgrade to an existing platform and not a redesign on the code base (which is probably why Vista, although pushing forward with new code, is failing with so many existing holes and whatnot). I know that personally I can live without NAP, extended descriptions of functions, enhanced cryptography, group policy updates, and ESPECIALLY Windows Product Activation.

As always, I will continue to recommend Windows XP SP2. (If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

I was actually going to post a topic about SP3, but since i'm here - i downloaded xp sp3 from microsoft's website, the system requirements are:

And you never guess what? Restart my pc and it doesn't even manage to get the boot screen, a blue screen appears and instantly my pc gets restarted - changed my setting (disable automatic restart on error) - then tried again, it said something like
"Misconfiguration in blabla library - jumble of letters and numbers after that". So then i had to repair my whole computer!

Now my pc runs unbelieveably slow - total con.

Haha... sorry about your bad experience, Flashy. Like I said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm curious too... don't get me wrong. But just the mere mention of the annoyance of WPA, along with the fact that there's nothing revolutionary as far as new features (to me, anyway) keeps me away from even trying.

So far, nothing requires SP3 to run. I don't think anything WILL require SP3 to run, as developers will probably glaze over Windows XP altogether to jump onto the failing Vista train... only to be bombarded by Microsoft's upcoming promotions for Windows 7.

Well usually people who are not testing the RC versions of windows shouldn't even be downloading it just because of how unstable they are. I would doubt they had some features turned off as they wanted to work each version on specific things, but with RC2 all the features should have been turned back on. I believe that was the final RC was RC2, but of course I don't know what they had in there because I don't want to risk losing everything on this one computer that is running XP. As for that benchmarks it is obvious you won't see any difference in the high end computer because of how fast it is. With your older computer you should see some improvement but you really have do a lot things in order to see it, but of course all computers are completely different and so the benchmarks are always going ot be different for someone. Either way with SP3 on its way, Windows XP will be at the pinnacle of this OS life span. In a few posts I mentioned that all they are really doing is combining all the hotfixes and stuff like that, they have a few new improvements, but all SP3 is a giant hotfix patch. So depending on the computer and what that computer is used for, it will either improve the computer or nothing will change.





Actually SP3 been talk about for a good 4 years now, but didn't start making headlines well into 2006 and 2007, even though Vista over shadowed all the headlines about SP3 because of how bad it was. In Microsoft's case Vista took the opposite affect and stung Microsoft pretty darn badly because of how everyone has rejected this OS, even with SP1 it still hasn't help Vista's case, and I think the only saving grace now for Vista is Windows 7. Well unless you in a technology business you have to keep updating your computer because your business can't take a chance of a trojan or a hacker getting into your computer and ruin your business, although in my personal opinion I wouldn't be surprise if your computer has been compromised and become a bot for someone.

I rather have my computer be constantly updated and secured then be some mindless bot and help a hacker do damage through my computer and my IP address. OF course granted it should be interesting to see if SP3 does any damage, and besides I plan to add a new hard drive soon and so if I can't work out this restore problem I can do a clean install and be completely updated and install a fresh computer.





Odds are you downloaded a RC version or you downloaded it from other site claiming to have the legit SP3 and did some tinkering with it, and like I explained above never download an RC version unless you back up your hard drive and then be able to restore just in case something like that happens.




Well like I said as a homer user SP3 doesn't seem to be needed, but at the business level, the new security features coming with SP3 will help them out. Of course with WIFI becoming big now SP3 will have some added benefits, but next week everyone will find out if SP3 was worth it or not.

I think saint michael is right this is just a mega collection of hotfixes. I just downloaded SP3 rc1 because I'm the curious type. I slaped it in my XP installation(no sp) tried to intergrate remote desktop as a hot fix but I the resulting CD still had no working Remote desktop. I want to make a customised, bootable XP CD(using nLite) with all the updates that I need but I don't know how to get them. I thought of using windows update to download all the updates avalable, copy the files to another location and add them as hotfixes to the installation but the problem is I dont know how to get those that have already been downloaded and installed. Does anyone know were to get all of them at one go? Doesanyone know where to find a working WM10 slipstreamer?