Where's my cookie?

[ProxRocks]

there are performance improvements in upgrading from SP2 to SP3...

i myself beta-tested for roughly a year...
i started with build 3180 (still have the official CD direct from Microsoft that was given to our company's IT guy, but he didn't want to mess with it at the time) and completely reformatted and reinstalled anew with each beta release thereafter (i'm thinking there was a DOZEN releases "easily")...

i had four or five "benchmark" programs that our IT guy also handed to me...

SP3 is faster than SP2...

BUT the "peak" of that 'fastness gap' was, according to the benchmarks i was running on three machines (1.8 GHz Pentium 4, 3.1 GHz AMD, and 3.4 GHz AMD), the "peak" was build 3244...

i was told, though never personally tested, that each beta build had a "time bomb" that would PREVENT it from working for longer than three months... otherwise, i myself would actually STILL be running build 3244 based soley on "benchmarks" and NOT "secureness level"...

the "build number" isn't showed in 'system properties' of the publicly-released official SP3, but i'm thinking it's 55-something... 5508? 5512?

the 'fastness gap' "narrowed" after build 3244 (3264?), but STILL better than SP2...

now, the "final" (55-something) SP3 isn't as "fast" as some of the beta versions, BUT i'm quite confident they are more "secure"...

however, as a safe hex'er, i would "prefer" to be able to run those faster beta builds, but i just wasn't willing to test the time bomb and wake one morning to discover my computer won't boot due to "beta expiration"...

the "final" SP3 isn't in-and-of-itself "faster enough" to warrant an SP2 upgrade, in my personal opinion... so as a "safe hex'er", i'd be more than happy at "staying with" SP2... but, after the many months of beta testing and benchmark studies, i feel that "time spent" would be 'wasted' if i did NOT upgrade to SP3 (which again IS "faster", but it's NOT going to turn a twenty-year-old Pontiac 2.5L Quad 4 into a 5.7L 340+ horsepower V8 LS1)...

so, if you're "driving" twenty-year-old hardware, sure, stick with SP2...
if you're "driving" anything newer than five, you will NOT have any problems at all with SP3 (for the record, the above post by forget-at-the-moment about SP3 and USB is the FIRST time i've ever heard of USB problems under SP3, so, um, that could be his/her hardware)...