shamino wrote:Due to a technical issue, I left my nephew's late P4 on SP2. At least as far as nVidia drivers are concerned, there's definitel […]
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Due to a technical issue, I left my nephew's late P4 on SP2. At least as far as nVidia drivers are concerned, there's definitely no problem. He's running 260.99, which is probably later than what you'll run on the cards you listed.
I don't know of any benefit to SP3 other than all the neverending security updates, and if some piece of software just demands it. I've never paid attention to what impact it has, but as minor as it may be, I probably wouldn't bother with SP3 in this case unless you find a reason it's needed.
I looked up DirectX 9.0c. At some point Microsoft forgot what version numbers are for and so there's multiple releases of "9.0c". The version released 4/28/2011 (not sure if that's the latest) requires SP2. Another version from 2009 requires only SP1. The only thing I ever ran into that had picky DirectX version requirements was the MGE mod for Morrowind.
I think one of the earlier service packs changed the default behavior of IE6 to stop automatically prompting to install random ActiveX plugins. The old behavior was probably the dumbest thing Microsoft ever did. But if this machine never sees a web page then it doesn't matter, and even if it does probably IE6 wouldn't be used.
This is something I wish they had patched for Win2k. On Win2k I had to do some ugly hack to get rid of an error message that constantly appears when the auto-downloads are disabled.
The "forgotten version numbers" is when Microsoft was trying to do "Monthly Hotfixes" or whatever for DirectX - it wasn't very consistent. 😵 Wikipedia says that they released bimonthly from 2004 to 2007, and then quarterly until 2010. According to MSDN what games are supposed to do is pack the redist they need and call its installer, and DirectX will say if that version (or higher) is loaded and the installer will exit quietly, otherwise it will automatically update your system with whatever the game needs (and generally users should click "yes" if the game asks to install DirectX 9). Of course that doesn't necessarily work for mods, and not all developers/publishers do it, etc.
It's SP2 that kills ActiveX in IE6 afaik - most of the bigger security updates came with SP2.
Stojke wrote:When did each service pack (SP1, SP2, SP3) originate, in what year/date?
Windows XP - Oct, 2001
Windows XP SP1 - Sept 9, 2002
Windows XP SP2 - Aug 25, 2004
Windows XP SP3 - Apr 21, 2008
All from Wikipedia, so there's a chance those dates aren't exactly accurate - the years all sound right thinking back though. 😊
mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:
OK, I will admit, that was kind of a flawed statement on my part. I remember having a P4 desktop that I kept offline for the longest time for fear of viruses, and it ran fast partially because I never updated it. I eventually put it online and installed SP3, and that's when it started to show its age. This would have been around late 2008, early 2009. Similarly, I had gotten my first laptop, an Acer Travelmate with a Pentium M and 512MB of RAM, around the same time, and since I decided this would be my "online" machine, I upgraded the installed SP1 to SP3. That's when I noticed a major performance drop.
Now, this was all before I discovered the magic of services.msc, and how to make custom install discs with the updates slipstreamed in using nLite. With enough trimming and tweaking, I'm sure SP3 can be well optimized for older hardware. They made a huge difference on the aforementioned Travelmate, that's for sure.
There's a difference between simply installing SP2 or SP3 for an offline machine and having all of the associated security/cleaning applications for running on the open Internet, plus all of the various plug-ins and whatnot kept up to date as well as the general bloat associated with the modern Internet to use the machine as a "daily main rig". For example modern anti-virus applications can be total resource hogs, the same goes for firewalls, web browsers, etc. But if the machine is offline it will never touch any of that, and there's no reason to load it up with any of that stuff as a result.
Data shows (as linked, and I really wish I could find the bigger article someone dug up a while ago that showed all three SPs through gaming and non-gaming tasks - the differences were about what you'd expect from the articles I did find, but it just had more data to look at) that SP1 v 2 v 3 is not going to create "sluggish" or "way slower" or similar situations HOWEVER various associated products and whatnot that game with "new eras" of computing can. For example most computers in 2001-2002 didn't run real-time anti-virus protection, real-time firewalls, and Flash and Shockwave were relatively small parts of a mostly text-based Internet. By 2008 that had changed pretty dramatically - the web has gotten very bloated, real-time anti-virus and firewall is considered standard practice, etc and all of that requires more resources. Now to computers that were modern in 2008 none of that is a problem - they have multi-core CPUs, multiple GBs of RAM, and GPUs that can assist with most video tasks. But to a computer from 2001 it may be a problem. However none of that stuff comes along for the ride with an SP2 or SP3 install, it's just contemporaneous to it.
tincup wrote:When XP Home was my primary OS I recall I rolled-back to SP2 since SP3 broke a number of games. I didn't bother to figure out why, or if it was due to driver conflicts unique to my setup, but rolling back solved the issues.
I hadn't realized that SP enabled USB2 as a previous poster noted. Crazy to think XP is really that old...
It's SP1 that adds USB2.0. Base Windows XP also doesn't come with DirectX 9 either. 😊 Yes, it's a very very old operating system.
Mau1wurf1977 wrote:My installation CD is XP Pro SP2.
What I have issues with is activation. I'm offline with my retro machines, no Internet. So I have to call MS each time. Is there a way around this?
I just plug them into my network (which has Internet access) while they're doing the finalizing steps of install, so when they first boot they have the network connection and then they perform automatic activation from there. I did a build a few days after the official end of support and it still activated okay, but I don't know for how long that will still work. Also lets me test the networking hardware on the machine, and I can pull down some installation files that way vs burning CDs (usually I download graphics drivers while the system is installing OS, so I have them faster than letting the machine download them).
Any other method around activation isn't exactly on the up and up, but I fear that in a relatively short period of time (a few years) that will be the only option for installing XP (even from legitimate/legal media and licences) if MS discontinues the activation servers. I don't know if this is actually for certain, but it's something that I've been pondering since re-installing Windows for my P4 system earlier this year.
