Does Service Pack 2 slow you down?

[Big Booger]

Microsoft released Service Pack 2 and millions installed it. Did boat anchors come with the enhancements? We threw 108 benchmarks at Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 in an attempt to declare a winner.

Does the old saying go "newer, better, faster" or "you can only rework the plumbing so many times"? Service Pack 2 brought enhancements to Windows XP including a very handy pop-up stopper and the much needed firewall security. A new Service Pack does improve upon some features of an operating system besides plugging up the holes but do the improvements come as extra weight or is some code jettisoned in favor of newer, leaner code?

A comparison between the Service Pack 1 clean install and Service Pack 2 clean install shows 4 extra processes and 42 extra megabytes added to SP2 on the test system.

The Full Comparison

[SupaStar]

Like the tests show, I noticed no major difference in performance.

[phishhead]

same here after turning some of the new features off I havent noticed any performance issues.

[hotmale]

For me, it's probably too early to say, but I don't think SP2 has slowed down my system, at least I didn't notice it. But if you feel any deterioration in performance, I'd say you should reconfigure Windows services according to blackviper because it's a bit different from SP1.

[Big Booger]

I should think that the service pack two fixes would far outweigh any performance loss. I personally haven't noticed, but it is interesting to see Sp1 and Sp2 compared.

[joshsiao]

I haven't really seen any difference in performance except that shutdown takes 1 min instead of the instant shutdown before.

[Rex Mundi]

Now that i have SP2 as well, i cant say i notice any difference either. Im even inclined to say that windows boots up 1 second faster.

[joshsiao]

Forgot to ask, but is it possible to cut the shutdown time from that 1 minute back to my instantaneous shutdown?

[Rex Mundi]

Cut the power to your computer? heh heh Even i dont have instantaneous shutdown on my p4 2.8GHz. Waaay too many apps open and way too many processes running here. Oh well c'est la vie.

[z3n]

Still havn't installed it.

[Conan]

Forgot to ask, but is it possible to cut the shutdown time from that 1 minute back to my instantaneous shutdown?

You can try this Josh:

Right click an empty space on your Desktop, choose new shortcut then fill it with the following:

Restart
C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -r -t 01

Shutdown
C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -s -t 01

then edit the name to whatever you want and you may also want to change the icon by right clicking and choosing properties. Hope this speeds up things for you.

[Rex Mundi]

But that is just a shortcut? Wasn't he referring to the shutdown process which takes 1 minute longer now?

[Conan]

But that is just a shortcut? Wasn't he referring to the shutdown process which takes 1 minute longer now?

Using those shortcuts to shutdown/restart should make things faster.

[joshsiao]

Thanks but it still takes a minute to shutdown.

[Conan]

Thanks but it still takes a minute to shutdown.

Sometimes firewalls or Anti-virus software are the culprits for slow shutdown speeds. Mine shuts down in 10-15 seconds. I remember Drive Image would add 30-45 seconds to my shutdown so off it went to the trash bin.