XP and audio / video apps: SP1 vs SP2 vs. SP3

[Seeker47]

To date, I've really only been a W2K user, except when working on someone else's rig. But I'm about to build or re-build a couple boxes of my own, probably going with XP this time. (No interest in Vista.) I'm aware that with successive releases, it seems to be MicroSquish's goal to lock things down more and more against the users' freedom in computing. It may be in the guise of "security", though from my general reading, theirs is pretty laughable. The part of it that concerns me is with things like DRM. I don't ever want to be blocked from using the apps of my choice, in the way I choose to use them.

Back in the day, I recall a lot of discussion over whether or not one should go to SP-2, if one uses a number of the apps that have been of most interest to VH members. I'd like to review some comment and experiences on that, extending it to SP-3 while we're at it. What are the pitfalls or drawbacks ?

[By the way, a consultant I know -- who tends to be on top of these things -- tells me that MS's successor to Vista is intended to be way more locked down than the Mac OS, or anything we now recognize. Doing a lot of the things you care about most and now take for granted will become impossible. User control will have been ceded to their control.]

[Krispy Kritter]

You may get more responses with reference to specific tools. In my experience, I haven't had any issues with any apps or tools in either of my machines. Both of which are now completely patched up to SP3.

[Ai Haibara]

Yeah, I haven't had any problems with any tools under XP SP3, either... so far.

[DarrellS]

I had to uninstall SP3 to install my audio and video drivers. ATI and Turtle Beach did not recognize the operating system.

Also, I've had problems with audio ever since I built this XP machine. I keep getting a machine gun sound while listening to audio files or watching the Hauppauge TV tuner card. I thought it had to do with the onboard audio but installing the Turtle Beach Catalina card produces the same audio problem.

I never had any problems with the audio in Windows 2000. The reason my friend, who also uses XP gave me the card was because he got unwanted noises with the card using his mouse. Moving the mouse seems to randomly cause the machine gun sound also.

[mpack]

There are no serious DRM problems that I'm aware of, up to and including SP2. However, if SP3 comes with WMP 11 then I would be wary, as that definitely has a large DRM component.

OTOH, if you find certain apps have a problem with uptodate XP components, you could look into running older versions of XP inside a virtual machine (eg. VirtualBox). The host needs plenty of CPU and RAM for this to work nicely though - say 2GB RAM plus a dual core cpu. The WinXP host runs great on that hardware too.

[Dr. DOS]

No issues at all with SP2 ... I remember reading a thread about AMD and SP3 .. you may want to research further is planning a AMD setup