[CP5670]

I upgraded my XP install to SP2 a few days ago and the memory commit charge has increased dramatically. It used to be around 80MB before on a clean boot, but it shot up to 170MB after the upgrade. I disabled some of the extra services and brought it down to about 140MB, but that's still much more than it was before. Is there some big service or something I'm missing, or is SP2 just inherently bloatware compared to SP1?

[Prophet]

is SP2 just inherently bloatware compared to SP1?

Yes.

[Fury]

Commit charge is pagefile, so don't worry about it, worry about available physical memory instead. I have 1GB RAM installed and I booted my system over 3 hours ago and have 650MB free RAM. Pagefile (commit charge) usage is little less than 300MB.

In any case, I generally recommend only two ways to install a service pack;
1) Clean install of Windows and then install service pack next, before any other drivers and software.
2) The most recommended way, integrate SP2 with your Windows installation media, also called as slipstream.

Installing SP2 on top of non-clean Windows installation is like installing XP again on top of old installation, this is because SP2 is a big upgrade to XP.

worry about available physical memory instead

And this by the way no longer holds true with starting with Vista, this is because Vista is adopting a new memory management similar to unix and linux. The keyphrase there is "unused RAM is wasted RAM", so instead of trying to get as much free RAM as possible it is more important to use available RAM effectively.

[CP5670]

Where can I find the physical memory usage? Anyway, there are more and larger svchost processes than before, but I can't think of what they would contain since the services I am running aren't much different from what I used to have.

I just used the "SP2 for IT professionals" download, as I didn't have time to reinstall XP from scratch. The only reason I installed it was that the MS dual core hotfix wouldn't work with SP1.

I guess this is not a big problem; it's just that I like to have my system as clean as possible.

[Kosh]

I said it before and I will say it again: SP2 sucks.

[Fury]

Where can I find the physical memory usage?

Task manager, the same tab where you looked commit charge up from.

I said it before and I will say it again: SP2 sucks.

SP2 is a great upgrade to XP from support technician's point of view even if end users don't know to appreciate it.

[Kosh]

It's not totally the support technician's savior considering that it does have a nasty tendency to frak up your windows install once in a while.

[Cyker]

SP2 is a damned lot better than Vanilla/SP1 XP, but you can't install it on an existing SP1 or vanilla system, esp. if that system has had patches and extra drivers installed, because more often than not it breaks it 

Fury has got part about it totally correct.

How many of you are using XP out of curiosity?
I'm tri-booting Win98SE, Win2k and Gentoo at the moment

[Fineus]

Am I one of the only ones who updated XP to SP1, then to SP2 - without any incident at all? Everything works and has been working for a long long time.

[Fury]

It's not totally the support technician's savior considering that it does have a nasty tendency to frak up your windows install once in a while.

While I am not aware of every possible hardware and software combination that might play a role in SP2 incompatibility, chances are pretty good that it would happen regardless of whether SP2 is installed or not. Should that not be the case, the first step in solving the problem would be to update motherboard BIOS. That's all I can say with nonexistent details about the problem, but I've got a hunch you don't want to solve it and would like to blame SP2 instead.

Am I one of the only ones who updated XP to SP1, then to SP2 - without any incident at all? Everything works and has been working for a long long time.

No you are not, there are still many factors in the play when you do it and chances that something goes wrong is multiplied when you install SP2 on non-clean XP installation.

[Kosh]

Should that not be the case, the first step in solving the problem would be to update motherboard BIOS.....

And your hunch would be flat wrong. Since I have a laptop, driver updates from the manufacturer seldom come out. One of the issues I have with SP2 was that now, suddenly, the internal drive won't read CD-R's anymore (no matter what is on it), only retail CD's (like game discs that I may have bought in the past, etc). Thankfully I have an external CD burner, so I have to pull it out whenever I want to see what is on a disk.

No you are not, there are still many factors in the play when you do it and chances that something goes wrong is multiplied when you install SP2 on non-clean XP installation.

Which is why I believe it was poorly designed. Not all of us have a free completly day to backup everything, reformat, install windows and SP2, then reload everything. But what if you are a network administrator who would need to backup, reformat and re-install everything in order to make the update work properly on 20+ computers?

[Nix]

Windows Service Packs are like repackaged OS's, making them able to be slipstreamed into Gold install sources.  It's not poorly designed, it's just the nature of the beast.  This OS is not nearly as modular as Linux is.  Apparently, all you have to do for Linux is recompile the kernel, or whatever ya do you Linux gurus do, and you have an OS upgrade.  Since Windows is not designed that way, this is the best way to apply huge OS updates, without forcing people to reformat.  Anyone with a gold or SP1 install can slipstream SP2 and have a super-reliable way to install Windows with thier most up to date service pack.  Of course, you still have to download the 46 or so required updates to be fully updated, and even then, you'll have to pick and choose certain updates because some may not work right in your environment.

Slipstream, or you're just begging for trouble.

BTW, I AM a network tech who backed up over thirty systems and reinstalled SP1, then installed SP2 over the top of it, this spring.  It took me two days to do it, backing up the hard drive data with Ghost, partitioning with Partition Magic, and installing XPSP1 onto the machines again.  I've been able to get away fairly clean if the very first thing you do after your first clean boot, is to run SP2, without installing ANY drivers at all.  After SP2 is installed, THEN do your updates and such.  After the install, everything was re-backed up to have a clean image, so I don't have to go through the installation process again.  No big problems here.  Of course these computers really only run one or two programs, integral to the business.  They won't be used as heavily as I would use my machine. 

[Fury]

Nix pretty much hit the bullseye with his explanation, thankfully MS has learned something from this and supposedly taken modular approach with Windows Vista. It remains to be seen how succesful they have been once the first SP comes out for Vista.

And your hunch would be flat wrong. Since I have a laptop, driver updates from the manufacturer seldom come out. One of the issues I have with SP2 was that now, suddenly, the internal drive won't read CD-R's anymore (no matter what is on it), only retail CD's (like game discs that I may have bought in the past, etc).

It does not really matter how often a manufacturer releases BIOS and driver updates as long as you at least use the latest BIOS and drivers. However, your problem is quite common and is usually caused by one of the following reasons, note "usually".
- A bug in the drive's firmware, should be updated if any updates are available.
- A software that uses the drive's burning features is not fully compatible with SP2 (assuming it does NOT happen with SP1), update any such software or replace it if it does not have any post-SP2 updates.
- The drive is failing.

[Nix]

The only way to see if Kosh's SP2 debacle is true, is to revert to SP1 and see if it stops working.  It's quite easy to blame a software upgrade to cause devices to stop working properly, when in all actuality, it probably failed near the same time the software upgrade was applied.  I, for example, blamed DARC when they came out with Divx 6, causing it to make my audio cut out whenever I tried to play back any video in any video player.  Turns out, it was Driver Cleaner 1.3 deleting a little more than it should have, when I did a driver upgrade at the same exact time as my Divx 6 install, which was the author's fault there with that version. 

But if it reads stamped CD's, but not burned CD's, it's probably a drive failure.  My old Yamaha drive did that same exact thing, stopped reading burned CD's, but still could limp through stamped discs.  since your removable drive works, I highly doubt that it's SP2 causing your drive to fail. I mean, come on, Windows still uses the same I/O and internal operations to read your removable drive, as it does to read your internal drive.  If SP2 broke your CDrom access, it'd probably do the same exact thing to every single drive you'd hook up to the machine, which would mean that either 1, your laptop has issues with SP2 as a whole, or 2, something has become corrupted in the OS and a reinstall is necessary at this point. 


It's just plain silly to blame M$ and thier service packs causing so much trouble, when really, it's a simple and effective process IF DONE CORRECTLY.  Windows is NOT Linux, so don't expect it to operate the same.  And dont jump up and down and say "IT SHOULD BE LIKE LINUX DANGIT!"  M$ had the right to make the OS as they saw fit, and yes, comparing it to other OS's, it's not as well designed, but you have to apply the updates correctly to see the full benefits, and stability that the new pack offers over older packs.  Of course, there's no one correct way to apply updates, but as stated by Fury and I, slipstreaming is probably your best way to get this done.  It's just so much easier to bash a big corporation and blame them for your problems.  Oh well. 

[Turnsky]

Sp2 works great, sure it complains about me not using windows update (which i refuse to use, if it ain't broke, don't fix it) as it stands, it's always best to install SP2 on a clean install, it's too much of a nightmare to install it over an install that's been running for a while..

either way, i've had this install running since i got my new Mobo, and that was something over a couple of years ago. So far, not one BSOD, hangup, etc.

[kode]

never had any problems with my sp2 either.

[IceFire]

I upgraded my XP install to SP2 a few days ago and the memory commit charge has increased dramatically. It used to be around 80MB before on a clean boot, but it shot up to 170MB after the upgrade. I disabled some of the extra services and brought it down to about 140MB, but that's still much more than it was before. Is there some big service or something I'm missing, or is SP2 just inherently bloatware compared to SP1?

I've gotten my SP2 install down to about 140 commit charge on startup.  After that its upto about 300 with a few programs running.  My co-worker has his down to 90 commit charge on startup.  SP2 adds a few extra features (security center for one) that SP1 didn't have so commit charge will be higher.  With 1GB of RAM its a drop in the bucket.

And yes...never had a problem with SP2...ever.  People are all so worried about it but its the best service pack and edition of WinXP to run.

[Kosh]

So, the drive would fail at EXACTLY the same time I install SP2? That's a hell of a co-incidence. I'll try rolling it back later, but I heard that also fraks it up so I need to back up everything. It will be a little while before I have some time to do that.

And BTW, I've never slepstreamed a SP install, and I have installed them on various machines, and WinXP SP2 was the only one to EVER give me problems.

[IceFire]

So, the drive would fail at EXACTLY the same time I install SP2? That's a hell of a co-incidence. I'll try rolling it back later, but I heard that also fraks it up so I need to back up everything. It will be a little while before I have some time to do that.

And BTW, I've never slepstreamed a SP install, and I have installed them on various machines, and WinXP SP2 was the only one to EVER give me problems.

Sounds like the laser in your device is either out of alignment or too weak to read from the burned disks.  The best way to test is is to try several different brands of CD-R and see if it can read them.  If it can read some then thats probably indicative of the problem.  The other thing to do is pop in your Windows install CD, boot to a command prompt with CD-Drivers enabled and see if you can read from burned disks.  If the problem is the OS and not the drive then you'll very quickly see what the issue is.  Then you can troubleshoot the correct item.

Upgrading to SP2 may have toasted a driver in your case (its rare in my experience) but its unlikely to damage hardware.  If the hardware was already failing it may have just exposed a problem rather than created one.

[CP5670]

I am running into an annoying problem with SP2. I use a variation (different colors) of the Windows classic theme, but whenever I restart it keeps reverting to the standard XP theme and I have to set it back manually. This never occurred in SP1. Is there any way to prevent this?