Someone here said he had better results with sp2 than with sp3 speedwise.

I've never seen any performance difference whatsoever between SP2 and SP3... and there is no reason there should be any difference, either, because SP3 is essentially just a rollup of updates that'd get installed on a SP2 machine anyway. The few new features/changes are quite minor and really only affect some network security settings and group policy stuff... nothing that you're likely to even encounter on a home machine.

Windows 2000 actually has seen quite a few improvements as of late, with the renewed work on the unofficial SP5. A lot of compatibility issues have been ironed out, so you may not need to play with wrappers as much as you think. I don't know if I'd go so far as to recommend it over XP for day-to-day use, but depending on what you're planning to do with the machine, it may still be an option worth considering.

I once had a Pentium 4 box that ran quite nicely with just SP2, but I was purposefully keeping it offline due to the potential security vulnerabilities. It slowed down to crap once I installed SP3 and put it online. 😜

I haven't noticed any differences either. I like my software to be updated. So SP3 for me. Yes, I have read elsewhere that SP3 doesn't play fair on some configurations for some reason but I have been lucky so far.

No difference in speed between SP2 and SP3, at least on your system- which is really well-specced for an XP system. Personally, I would avoid W2000.

I think there is a difference, but like eL_PuSHeR said I prefer software to be updated to the latest versions. The difference is mostly noticable in machines with 1GB and less RAM and Pentium 4 machines.

I think SP3 contains some optimizations for Core processors, so it might actually be a bit faster than SP2 on newer systems. When I installed it on my Core 2 Extreme 3.4GHz system there seemed to be a noticeable speed boost. P4 users might do better to stick with SP2, not sure.

You'll need SP3 in order to run modern programs. Everything compiled with the latest version of Visual C will not run on SP2 and below.