Hi, I hope you're all still following this topic. After reading Microsoft's
advisory articles about installing SP3 for WinXP, I performed the evil deed
the other evening, from the Windows Update website. Now, although I don't do
Windows updates automatically, I do nevertheless keep my machine up to date
with manual downloads and the WU website seemed to suggest that, after
analysing my machine, there'd be very little difference between my current
state and SP3. But, for completeness, I decided to update with SP3. The
result was a success but in the process it's bumped up the used portion of my
WinXP partition by about 2 - 2.5GB, leaving me with only 3GB of spare
capacity now left on that partition. What I'd like to know from any of you
SP3 gurus is whether that should have resulted and, if so, what is all that
extra data? Does SP3 actually install a complete compressed copy of the
pre-SP3 operating system and programs, as well as modifying the current
partition contents?
I've checked all this out in Disk Management. I've also now run a defrag on
the partition, though it didn't really need it. In the process, I could see
graphically that my WinXP partition has a huge wadge of (green) unmoveable
files. Since this is the boot partition, I've presumed those files to be the
partition table, etc - but 2GB-worth!?
Normal updating each month from WU takes no more than a minute or so on my
machine but, with SP3, the downloading and installing of SP3 took a whole 30
mins! And during that time, my hard disk was going crazy, shifting stuff
around. Considering that the SP3 file itself is supposed to be a mere 70MB,
why on earth did it take so long to install? I'm beginning to wonder whether
I should have temporarily disabled both Windows Defender and my third-party
software firewall, as well as my antivirus client. I'd turned off the latter
but Defender and the firewall were still active, and afterwards I noticed
that firewall entries like Windows Installer had been left disabled by me.
But Microsoft's advisory notes had not said to disable any firewall, so I
hadn't.
So, like I say, despite WU taking about 10 mins alone to 'prepare' the
download and despite the download and installing being incredibly slow, it
did complete without a hitch, in my case.
Since then, I've checked that the General tab of System is saying the right
thing and that the service pack in Windows Explorer and in Add/Remove
Programs looks okay, and it is. Also, my machine (Intel single-core CPU,
incidentally) appears to be running okay. Oh, and I had IE7 before, and that
doesn't seem to have been a problem.
But the only problem I have is that adding SP3 has apparently bumped up the
used portion of the partition from about 6GB to nearly 8.5GB, and it's only a
12GB partition I'm using! I really want to find out, if I can, what that huge
new block of data is. If it's something to do with uninstalling SP3 or
perhaps something concerning Last Known Good Configuration, then maybe I'll
leave things as they are. Otherwise, I'm inclined to use my partition
ghosting application and restore to my previous SP2 partition.
Incidentally, I see that someone in this discussion group has given a link
to the group that's currently talking about WinXP and SP3 specifically, over
in the Tech Net discussion group. When I try to sign in there, it seems to
want me to regsiter completely afresh. Why? I thought the whole idea of
Windows Live ID was that you could use your signing in details anywhere!
