XP SP3 memory consumption? (VS SP2)

[ET]

I want to install SP3 on a notebook with only 512MB of RAM. Has anyone checked what effect installing SP3 has on memory usage? (SP2 was bad in this respect.)

 

[gerf]

I don't know about RAM usage, but the Windows battery manager shows more battery life.

I hope anandtech or someone has a good performace review of SP3 sometime soon, as we seem to be lacking hard data in general.

 

[ChronoReverse]

http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2303830,00.asp

It says Vista vs XP but it gives both SP2 and SP3 performance for XP.


The short version is that SP3 doesn't do much (which nobody in their right mind should have suspected otherwise).

 

[ET]

Actually that article was the one that made me want to install XP3. The drop of 25% in boot time is significant. My subnotebook takes about 2 minutes to boot, so I'd appreciate such an improvement. What I'd like to know is whether there are significant drawbacks in a resource constrained environment..

 

[ET]

gerf, do you really get more battery life, or is it just a cosmetic change?

 

[ET]

After reading http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1747&page=1, it looks to me like the boot time improvement was simply because ExtremeTech clocked bare SP2 vs. SP3. Given an up to date SP2, SP3 won't provide that improvement.

 

[norwood9]

Vista is known to be a resource consumer.

 

[biostud]

I run sp3 on my laptop 1.6Ghz Pentium-M 512mb ram, and it seems a little faster than sp2, but I can't tell for sure.