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Written by Ivan Vujic
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Friday, 27 June 2008 |
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Page 1 of 2  Microsoft came out with latest service pack for XP, four years after SP2 was released. XP itself is very stabile system with SP2 installed, so SP3 is considered as not so innovative like it was SP2. The essence of this service pack is to bring all patches for XP that are released until now. Beside patches attended for safety of your OS, SP3 also contains few new additions that should provide better network collaboration, easier administration etc.
Service pack is cumulative so you can install it on XP on which is already installed SP1 or SP2, while for “basic” version of Windows XP that doesn’t have effect. Microsoft recommends installing SP3 on system that already supports SP2. If you decide to integrate SP3 in Windows installation and install Windows with integrated SP3, we should tell you that you can do even that. But, during installation new possibility will wait you: OS installation without need to enter serial number. Also bear in mind recommendation that integration should be done on Windows installation with integrated SP2, but this also can be done with systems with built in SP1. If you install SP3 using Windows update service, you will have to download from Internet from 40MB up to 316, depends how often you upgraded system.
We installed SP3 on Windows that was upgraded on daily bases and that has a lot of installed applications. This was the only way to see if there is any improvement regarding SP2. It takes about 10 minutes on 512Kbps connection for downloading using Windows update service. Also it takes about 15 minutes (which is radically less than it takes for installation SP1 for Vista) for installation SP3 and 900MB on system partition. All settings are left unchanged after SP3 installation except for Spyware Terminator service– it was set on manual start-up, but after SP3 installation it starts automatically. The same thing happened again when we installed SP3 on other computers with Spyware Terminator installed, so it seems that this is “normal”. Rest of the installed programs worked without any problem so it turned out that SP3 is more grateful than it was SP2 in its time.
In real time conditions we didn’t see any distinctions in favor of SP3 but we noticed that system boots up faster (there is no more white line on boot up screen in our case) and Windows takes a little bit more memory than it did with SP2. We repeated tests several times to get as much reliable results as possible. What we saw during tests is that SP3 brings a little bit faster HDD transfers and we were definitely convinced in that when we started integrated disc defragmentation and noticed shorter time needed for full defragmentation of partition with FAT32 file system. The interesting thing is that defragmentation of system partition was done completely which wasn’t the case with Windows XP SP2. Also we noticed that Spyware Terminator, as any other antispyware and antivirus programs, does faster system scanning which now has much more files to scan thanks to installed SP3. All this only confirms better work with HDD. Also we noticed that some applications are starting faster like, for example, Visual Studio 2005.
But SP3 for Windows XP also brings some regressions. Games worked a little bit slower with SP3. Certain lag was appearing especially in Crysis demo. Its worth of mentioning that some programs require minimum XP with SP2 for installation, but they don’t recognize SP3 as version that already has integrated SP2 and of course, these programs refuse installation and you will have to wait for new version of those programs. If you installed those programs before SP3 installation they will work normally after installation of this service pack. Real example of programs that doesn’t recognize SP3 is first version of IE7 that couldn’t validate installation, while newer version of IE7 can be installed without any problem. Older drivers for ATI graphics cards have similar problems but those can be easily fixed with installation of drivers through device manager. If you have installed IE7 or IE8 beta before SP3 than you won’t be able to uninstall those, so we recommend you to uninstall before SP3 installation and install them again after SP3 installation. Sometimes network connection simply stopped working for a while and if you uninstall SP3 this phenomenon will disappear. So, it seems that this problem appeared with new service pack. In most cases this problem can be solved with installation of newer drivers for network card. And in the end we should mention that after SP3 installation you may expect that system won’t boot up even in safe mode. These situations become very frequent on branded computers that have pre-installed Windows and in such cases you can blame computer manufacturer, not Microsoft.
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