Windows updater did a good job automatically updating SP2 to 3. I've found a few SP2 (and a few SP1) machines that had Windows Updater disabled... but the other

Windows updater did a good job automatically updating SP2 to 3. I've found a few SP2 (and a few SP1) machines that had Windows Updater disabled... but the other thing is that hardware hit a sort of plateau point around the Athlon 64 x2 era where the hardware got "fast enough" to make you not want to throw the monitor out the window at how slow it is. Not application load time slow, mouse lag, app freezing and churning and graphical glitches from paging on too little memory. That and mechanical hard drives saw a lot of longevity revolutions in the early 2000s. Last generation IDE and any SATA disk in my experience seem to handle many, many more power on cycles than older models. This was even before SMART, so I can't even test some of these disks for how error prone they are. I'd say 95% of XP machines I've touched are SP3, and I've dealt with over a hundred of em. Even a few small businesses I've pressured to switch off XP were at least running SP3. IE6 is a much more prevalent issue on those older machines, where end users would ignore the popups and prompts from home pages and websites about how their browser is literally satan.