What is the difference between windows sp3 and sp2

You won't be able to do it. It's not just the base XP SP2 operating system by the way. I think it's a perfectly safe prediction to say that if you're still running XP SP2 in August, your systems are almost certainly going to be infested with botnets , rootkits , and other malware.

It's not that hard. If you don't, well, don't blame me if you sit down some morning soon and find your computer spilling your credit card numbers to J. Random Hacker or cheerfully sending Viagra spam to all your friends.

Steven J. Sorry this didn't help. Thanks for your feedback. It depends on just how old the computer is. Although XP sp3 includes all of the previous updates, you can't install XP directly from the original or "gold" version of XP.

You must have at least sp1 or 1a the KB article below says 1a, but the only difference between 1 and 1a is that the latter deleted the Microsoft Virtual Machine aka Microsoft's version of Java. If you have the gold version you can install 1a and then 3 or 2 and then 3. Details in KB There were, of course, many security updates after sp3 was released. Visit Windows Update after you successfully install SP3. JavaScript is disabled.

For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. Previous Next Sort by votes. Mar 27, 0 10, 5. Also should I trust ebay for a copy of windows 7 ultimate? I need XP mode but I'm a little tight on Cash.. Will paypal give me some safety? I've never had to make a refund claim with paypal in the past Jul 5, 1, 0 12, There is no Windows 7 SP3, so if someone is trying to sell you something claiming it's in there, that would be a good sign to start moving far away from them.

And buying Windows on eBay is always something of a tricky proposition, because while there are legitimate sellers, there are probably scammers for every legit seller. I would also say 60 quid for Ultimate, even an OEM version, is a bit on the cheap side, and so likely one of the numerous scams. That basically lets you pay the difference in price between whatever version of Windows 7 you have, and the version you want.

That would be probably the cheapest safe method open to you. Yeah it wasn't advertised as having a different service pack Jan 3, 15, 0 52, Again, I used the PC with the kind of resources you're likely to have in your office. With that as a given, I didn't think either computer system would deliver outstanding performance. Still, these systems should run Vista decently. Rather than try to upgrade either PC to Vista, I wiped the systems and started with a fresh foundation.

Vista, in my experience, does not work and play well with upgrades from older versions of Windows XP, or even Vista for that matter.

Despite that precaution, I still ran into hardware incompatibly issues. The audio chipset, even though it's as common as dirt, also proved to be a problem. I finally got it to work by downgrading to an older Microsoft Vista driver for the chipset.

All that done, while the Vista experience control assured me that both systems could run the Aero graphics interface, the only Aero feature that worked was translucency. Even then, I would sometimes get a completely black screen for a moment, when switching applications, before the new application would come to the foreground.

That nuisance aside, while applications ran sluggishly on the Vista SP1 systems, at least they performed better than they had with plain old Vista. Well, that is, if the applications didn't need to call on network resources. Finding the servers on my tiny system network running on Fast Ethernet took over a minute. And I hadn't seen file copying this slow since the days of 10Mbps Ethernet. I also ran into several networking problems that required hands-on configuration changes. To fix that, you need to adjust a network login default, which is hiding in Vista's security policies.

Do I really need to go on?