Side effect of SP-2 on Windows XP

I was hurrying down the corridor, I was to make a presentation to the Executive Director at 11 AM. Now is 9:30, I have more than an hour to make the presentation. This is not a great start of the day. I don’t have my laptop with me. My daughter kept it at home for making her science project. I asked the IT department to spare me a laptop for a couple of hours. Ms. Mita , after a brisk search gave me a laptop. While handing it she warned that the laptop is a bit slow and little outdated.

No problem, I have to make only five slides with hardly 30 lines to go. Any damn PC with power point will do it. Isn’t it ?

The laptop was a P-III , 550 MHz 128 MB RAM with windows XP operating system.

My nightmare started in the broad daylight when I started the work. The laptop was horribly slow .It perhaps gives a new dimension to the word slow. Every command takes at least 3 to 4 minutes to execute. I call Ms Mita for help. Over phone she says that there is nothing wrong with the laptop except being slow. She assures me that it is not because of virus . Only the XP is too heavy for this poor laptop to run. That is why nobody wants to use this laptop now. Then I asked her why then she loaded the poor laptop with XP. Her answer was that XP is the standard operating system of our organization now.

I was at loss ! Luckily my friend Nagraj arrived there. I borrowed his laptop which is a latest P-4 core duo , 2GB RAM laptop. It took me hardly half an hour to make 5 slides and finally made the presentation from Nagraj’s laptop to the director.

The poor laptop was still lying on my chair. I have seen laptops like this running XP , there must be something wrong with this one.

I normally love to work on Linux , windows is not my forte nor IT is my department. I am a power plant operation expert. But my passion for computer urged me to tweak this laptop.

So I brought it home. First I tried with all the normal cleaning process but it was not much effective. I browse the internet and found that hundreds of bulletin boards claiming that service pack-2 slows down XP. At the same time many bulletin boards claim that SP-2 boosts performance besides giving more stability.

My hunch says that for anything related to Micro Soft first take the negative. The company has a history of making mistakes . So I set forth for removing SP-2 from it. I asked Ms. Mita for permission. She happily agreed as there is no taker for it.

It was a very painful process. IT took more than an hour to remove the SP-2 (control panel – add-remove software) .On the process it warned me of many dire consequences but I heed to none and went ahead. Finally it was removed and the laptop took a restart.

Now it is a windows XP with no service pack.

The result was astounding. On a 800*600 resolution and 16 bit hi color it was flying like a kite. The power point and excel is opening in less than 6 seconds not 3 minutes !!!

I was dancing . My wife got puzzled !. I called my daughter to test the laptop. She tried the pinball and solitaire game and then said it was not a good laptop. That’s my certificate , It was not the worst laptop now.

Next day I took it to my office , called Ms Mita to check the laptop. She also could not believe it. She was immensely happy with the performance. Her only concern is now without SP-2 it can easily get infected with virus. But that is no doubt lot better than making it the worst laptop ever.

So my friends what about your laptop or the desktop ? It is having the same problem? Why not try it my way once?. Micro Soft will never accept the fault but the message boards all over internet are replete with it.

Just search ‘does sp2 slows down xp’ (Remember to use the quote) on google.com and get yourself satisfied.

Bye

S. Bera

http://berasomnath.sulekha.com/blog/post/2008/07/is-your-laptop-or-desktop-is-slowing-then-it-s-time.htm