With the looming cessation of support for Windows XP Service Pack 2 in 13 July 2010, I have given in to upgrading my home PC to Service Pack 3. (Hears all gasps of horror.) According to Jerry Bryant of Microsoft in a bulletin dated 04 Feb, people need to either upgrade to Windows 7 or Windows XP Service Pack 3. I chose the latter because the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor told me that my PC is not able to accommodate this new and much hyped OS. Really got no choice there.

As advised, I backed up my drives (150Gb is the size of my backup file) and created a restore point. In hindsight, creating a restore point was a bit moo because if the upgrade fails and my PC gets f***ed, how on earth would I be able to run restore?

Anyhow, since I have constantly and repeatedly rejected the automatic updates for SP3 in the past, I had to go to the Microsoft Update website in IE (more gasps of horror!). It said that with my internet connection, it would take 22 minutes to download the SP3 installation file. Great, I though, won’t take long. Of course, these things are not accurate as they say because the download took 45 minutes. And for some reason, it attempted to do it twice.

The installation wizard launched immediately when download completed and prompted me to backup my files and close all running applications. I’ve done the backup already and as for closing all apps, does that include the anti-virus, spyware and firewall? Oh well, they were running but I set them to install mode.

I was watching the upgrade intently and the first ‘error’ encountered was that it couldn’t copy the flash.exe and that it wanted me to point it to the correct location of the Windows System File. Having no clue to what it was asking me to do, I clicked on Cancel. I thought that it would discontinue the upgrade but thankfully there was an option to skip that file.

I continued watching and noticed that it was copying files in a strange order. One would think that Microsoft would logically sort them A-Z in order for the user to get an idea of its progress. But no. It was copying from Z-A but somewhat looping through a set. The next ‘error’ prompted to me — this time by Spyware Terminator — is the IE extension change. Hmm. What change exactly, I don’t know. As I couldn’t be bothered looking it up, I accepted the change.

An hour after I began, the installation was complete. Following the mandatory reboot, Windows asked me to turn Automatic Updates on so it could check and download further fixes. At this point, I could say that the upgrade was successful but I’ll continue monitoring for the days to come. Luckily, I didn’t experience any of the horror stories during the installation and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I will not suffer the post-install troubles as well.

There isn’t much difference, visually, now that SP3 is installed. I’m wondering how other got their desktops re-configured to look different from the typical (and sometimes boring) Windows XP themes. Suggestions welcome, of course.

For now, I shall take comfort in the fact that I will continue to get support from Microsoft beyond 13 July 2010. Eh, comfort? Well, I’ll let you decide on that one.