Windows XP Service Pack 4

I just installed Windows XP and manually applied SP3. Now I’m downloading over 80 meg of updates. And that’s after trimming it down to the bare essentials.

Is it time for SP4?

6 thoughts on “Windows XP Service Pack 4

  1. Chris Till

    XP is discontinued, with extended-extended-extended support in place due to the extensive use because of the Vista disaster. MS have made it abundantly clear for several years there will be no SP4 – it’s SP3 and 179+ updates forever…

  2. Ed

    Yeah, but isn’t there some capable person in the real world (i.e., everything outside of Microsoft) who will consolidate all the critical updates into one file, post it on the interwebz, and save the real world a lot of time and aggravation? (Someone did that many years ago with W98.)

  3. Jeremy

    @Ed

    I hope so. The uptake of W7 has been phenomenally slow. Even today, virtually every new game that comes out is compatible with XP. W7 compatability is just an afterthought. The compatability mode in W7 is really just a virtual PC running a copy of XP, which would be a good thing for getting your XP games to run, except the virtual PC has no virtual graphics accelerator card. The compatability mode was only put in to cater for applications, not games. Try running any XP game with it and it’ll be like watching a slideshow.

    I have shelves of hundreds of PC games that all run on XP and no games that require W7, so I have no reason to upgrade and every reason to stick with XP. The only thing that *might* change my mind is if the majority of games become W7 only and MS improve their XP compatability in W7 to run games as smoothly as they would do on native XP.

    For the time being, W7 has only a sprinkling of games that take advantage of its minor improvements. Plus, they removed a lot of user features in W7 that I liked in XP.

    So really, what reason do people have for buying into this new version? Is it just because its new? That would be somewhat shallow, wouldn’t it?

    New W7 user: I got the new Windows 7, look at the cool widgets and stuff!
    XP user: So what can you do with it that I can’t, besides show off the gui?
    New W7 user: Ummmmm….

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