Microsoft released Service Pack 2 and millions installed it. Did boat anchors come with the enhancements? Short-Media threw 108 benchmarks at Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 in an attempt to declare a winner.
Does Service Pack 2 slow you down?
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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The site is obviously running the slower of the two service packs.
the url linked is now redirecting back to OSNews. guess they didn’t like the traffic. :/
No…. it doesn’t.
It would be nice if each article has a mirror link right after the link to the real site, e.g. with an anchor text of “(mirror)”.
For instance, the Coral NYU Distribution Network lets you turn any link into a mirror link by just adding “.nyud.net:8090” onto the end of the hostname. That would make this the above article’s mirror link:
http://kama.sarcnet.com.nyud.net:8090/xpsp1vsxpsp2_page1.html
You can read about Coral here:
http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/
It would also help if they added some indication of the meaning of the benchmarks. Is higher better or lower better?
Just look at the percentage coloumn. That’s what counts. If you need to look at the numbers, it’s simple. If test SP1 was 1% faster in test X and it got higher numbers, higher numbers are better. Perhaps it depends on the benchmark.
But as I said, just look the percentage coloumn and ignore the other numbers
With percentages, it still matters whether higher is better, or lower is better. (For example, 99% customer satisfaction is good, 15% dropped packets is bad.)
I don’t know if it made my pc faster or slower, but it deleted all my email account information from outlook, it reset all bookmarks and preferences in IE and WM. It defaulted all my office xp and menu customization. In overall, a bad experience regardless of any speed gains
I personally have had very bad results with SP2. My system crashed a lot and was slower, however I think that’s just my computer. I use SP2 at school and I have not had any problems with it. It is stable and seems to be fairly responsive.
I haven’t noticed much of a difference in performance or functionality between the two service packs. So much focus had been placed on the security aspects of SP2 i am sure microsoft snuck in some other bug fixes/patches as well.
I felt safe enough to uninstall Norton Antivirus after I installed SP2: that combined made my old good computer noticeably faster.:)
Kids, don’t run Windows computer without AV at home. Leave it to grown-ups with CS degree.
I have installed SP2 on several computers and haven’t noticed a speed difference one way or the other.
When you could just read the conclusion with the data in tabular form at:
http://kama.sarcnet.com/xpsp1vsxpsp2_page6.html
Where I work, we have about 300 computers all identical, just ghosted about a month ago with very restricted internet access so we know they are identical, yet when we rolled out SP2 through the SUS server last week, about 15 decided to have random problems, some would no longer boot at all, some said the SP2 installation failed and we just had to restart it, and some decided to corrupt user data across the system (which is ok, storing all user profiles on the servers w/ backup). I thought it was just a bit odd some machines did fine, and others fscked up even though they were all identical.
They were all new Dell Optiplex GX270 P4 2.8 w/ 512mb ram and mostly empty 40gb hard-disks.
So I do believe when some people have random stupid problems out of the blue and others have none.
what you said makes no sence. 15% is high for Droped packets. what you want is an inverse relationship where low = bad.
so 15% packet delivery = bad.
I’m actually able to crash XP now whereas it was rock solid before.
Much slower, for whatever reason, and I’ve found no real value in the extra security stuff…seems like fluff.
An SP2 slipstream install is noticeably faster than either RTM or SP1, but an upgraded install started at RTM or SP1 will be considerably slower than running at SP1
You really need a slipstreamed disk and a clean install with SP2, but its worth doing
After installing SP2 I experienced no network connectivity.
Wheter the firewall was turned off or on, it did not matter: no website was reachable from IE, while Firefox worked almost only on google (?) and not all the times. No irc/messenger/icq/ftp/whatever.
Disinstalling the SP2 led me to a working machine.
No clue on why this happened; maybe there was some rule added for my specific setup? Note that I was sharing a connection with another w2k machine, and that the net was perfect on that pc. Thank you Microsoft, I was so sheltered with SP2 that I couldn’t even access the net. Now THIS is security!!!
Anyway I’m on FreeBSD normally 🙂
The article shows what I found out already: SP2 runs more processes and takes more memory.
On machines with not that much memory (like 256 Mb), the 40 Mb is a lot and makes your computer use more swap memory, thus slowing it down considerably.
SP2 did something really marvellous about my security problems – it trashed my windows installation beyond my repair skills and made me decide that it was time to give linux another try as my only installed OS on my main computer.
I am thinking it will stick this time.