Service Pack 2

Well, after many weeks of procrastination, I finally did it. I let Windows XP Service Pack 2 install.

I had hesitated for a couple of reasons. One was a couple of horror stories I'd read about SP2. Of course, I believe most of those horror stories came from people running, shall we say, non-standard versions of Windows XP.

And I wanted to be sure that all my data was decently backed up. So after copying most files over the network to my desktop, I also burned a few CD-Rs today. Normally I wouldn't be quite so paranoid about doing an upgrade, but I realized I would have some extra challenges with a laptop if I had trouble. If it were a desktop, I'd have the option of taking out a hard drive, and making it a secondary on another machine to get data off. But with the laptop, I don't really have that option. So I wanted to be safe.

I managed to clean up some space just as the SP2 install was loading. It turned out well, as SP2 used up about 850M on my hard drive. This is no small amount on a laptop.

The install process took longer than I expected. I'd say over 2 hours. And it looked like it kept installing the same file more than once - like explorer.exe.