I often grit my teeth when I read “expert” advice on performance that has no relation to external reality. That’s why I was very happy to see one Web site perform a comprehensive set of system benchmarks aimed at answering the question, “Does Service Pack 2 slow you down?”
They ran 108 separate benchmarks, with a heavy emphasis on gaming-related tests. The SP1 machine had better performance scores on 63 of the tests, while the SP2 machine was faster on 42 of the tests. If you’re into this sort of thing, you can look at all six pages of charts and graphs. Or you can skip to the conclusion:
The test PC equipped with Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 was an average of 0.5% faster than the same hardware with Service Pack 2 installed. The percentage difference between faster and slower is insignificantly small. Less than 2 or 3 percent in some benchmarks could be dismissed by most but when gamers are looking to squeeze every extra frame out of their machines…it may count.
One-half of one percent is statistically a blip, especially when the test results are distributed in both directions. I’ve personally installed SP2 on a whole bunch of computers and this test matches my experience. If you see a noticeable slowdown after installing SP2, look elsewhere for the cause.
Ed Bott 
This is not correct. SP2 does have performance problems.
In memory constrained PCs SP2 severly impacts performance, as the system increases virtual memory paging.
This is especially an issue for typical consumer PCs, which have 256 MB RAM and plenty of extra software running.
And your test results are where? Sorry, but blind assertions, unsupported by actual data, do little for me. Especially when posted by someone who doesn’t leave any identifying information.
the “Does Service Pack 2 slow you down?” link is a 404 .. is the page still available ?
You need to get control of your off the mark modifiers. You have an extremely bad habit of using far too many excessive adjectives that severely impact the negative credibility of your otherwise super commentary.
I DL’d SP2 with 46.6 to 50 and it took a long time. Finally I ran it and was disappointed as it made this blob file and little else. Furthermore I have been forced to reload windows into 2 plus gigabites which has given me a lot of grief. I delited one of the extra windows on C drive and try to run everything on c as D is so limited.
Advice?
Ernesto
PS…You seem very knowledgeable about SP2 which my daughter describes as “buggy and problematic”.
I know my XP is authentic as I used my daughter’s copy.
Still I perceived that I was treated by Microsoft as if it was a pirated copy. Then the blob file…and I have “Backups” all over the place. I ran taskmtr.exe and it came up 8 times.
Umm, you guys can tote the glory of SP2 all you like and keep trying to blame slowdown on other factors, but I have installed it on three different machines and all of them experienced significant boot lag after the installation. I tried modifying the startup list and even going into the services menu to close down unnecessary programs. Neither one helped any of the three machines. Uninstalled SP2. Wham, everything is back to thirty second boot times. I have several friends who have experienced the same. Others have not. This suggests to me that there is some aspect of some machines that SP2 is not friendly towards, but the blame still rests squarely on Service Pack 2 not being completely compliant.
BTW, all three machines had in excess of 1.5 Gig of PC 3200 DDR RAM, so memory shouldn’t have been an issue (especially on the 4 Gig machine).
SP2 is slowing your comp, and everybody is talking about it, but…no one has a selution, if anybody have please let me know about it.