The Upgrade Hu-Ha of Windoze XP SP 3

My gut feeling was right: XP Service Pack 3 sucks

Cuppa already delayed the installation by almost one month and thought it would be safer to install the SP later rather than earlier.

Compared to other horror stories on SP3 floating in the net, I was lucky, because my laptop still booted up properly after applied SP3. However the speed for everything was much slower from then on (e.g. roughly 50% more time for login. Under XP SP2 it took me less than 10 second, but with SP3 it could take about 15 seconds). Boot up was slower, login was slower, and even time to launch application was also slower. Personally I suspect M$ did that deliberately, just to close the speed gap between XP and Vista. Obviously Intel would love this SP, because now users will need a more powerful CPU to go along.

Slowness was not the only thing in SP3 that bothered me. After installation, my wireless connection only worked sporadically, and if I left it idle for more than, say, 10 minutes. It would crash and a hard reboot of the system was needed.

The only good about SP3 was it did a system restore point before installation, and the users can uninstall it via 'Add or Remove Programs'. I restore my laptop back to pre-SP3 era, feeling so much better now.

Will I still apply SP3? I will say wait until next year, at least.