[gui-talk] The straight skinny on Service Pack 3, please?

[Joel Deutsch]

On other lists, people are going crazy messaging back and forth about the 
Win XP SP 3 release that became available for download a day or two ago. 
Some simply say they've downloaded and installed it, and everything's 
working fine on their computers, Jaws included.

Nonetheless, others keep discussing it as if it were potentially hazardous 
or, at the least, worthy of much care and concern. Some say not to bother, 
because the service pack is nothing more than a collection of a lot of 
updates you probably already have unless you've not been updating all along. 
Others point to the size of the download, something over 300 megs, and say 
before you go get it, you'd do well to defrag your hard drive, not that 
occasional housekeeping of that sort is a bad idea anyway. The feeling is of 
living in a small mountain town without telephones or newspapers, and 
everyone's just passing rumors back and forth at the church social or 
something. It's sort of nuts. Or at least, it's making me a bit crazy.

Would I be correct to believe that this service pack is a perfectly 
legitimate and desirable update for my Windows XP Home SP2, won't interfere 
with Jaws, probably has something or other helpful in it beyond just all the 
updates I've been automatically collecting with my priority update setting, 
and that I should just follow the download links some people have provided 
and install the thing?

I remember Albert's already using Vista. But Nick, Mike, Steve, Doris, Ray, 
and others? What are you folks doing?

Thanks.