I had to bite the bullet and reinstall XP today. Right now it’s reformatting the HD.
My question: What advantages would Service Pack 3 give me over SP 2? Should I just stick to SP 2?
After setting up all my programs and updates, I would like to save it on a partition and enable it to do a complete reinstall from that partition (I’d prefer not to use an ISO and recovery disk.) Where can I get instructions for that?
SP3 has a bunch of securiy enhancements over SP2. Tere is nothing better about SP2, and nothing worse about SP3. SP2 is also now an “unsupported configuraton” in msft-speak. Which is to say any bugs it has will stay there.
I’m unclear why you have to reinstall XP that probably already had all the updates on it. Maybe it was a virus or something corrupt that you gave up on. I can only recommend that you have a cloned disk nearby or installed and keep that fairly up to date. When problems come along, just copy it back in about 10" and you are set to go. I continue to do that even though the recovery function in XP has taken care of everything so far. I also run CCleaner regularly and correct the registry when programs are removed or added.