Author Topic: Are you testing XP SP3 RC ?? (Read 94,311 times)

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #25 on:** November 30, 2007, 05:12 PM »

And so far: stability?

Darwin · « **Reply #26 on:** November 30, 2007, 05:19 PM »

Quote from: Nighted on November 29, 2007, 03:09 PM

...Since upgrading to SP3, explorer hasn't crashed once (strange...very strange ). I'll give it a couple days and see what happens...

I'm comforted by this statement - for some reason explorer.exe crashes every other day on my system (XP Pro Sp-2) and often sits at 70-90MB of RAM usage (~50MB VM). The other bizarre thing is that often I have two instances running. Can't recall ever seeing this before. Anyway, the upshot of this is that I *hope* that from what Nighted is reporting I can infer that this has been dealt with in Sp-3 (please, pretty please with sugar on top).

blarson and Nighted, you brave souls, please keep the updates on your experiences coming

nosh · « **Reply #27 on:** November 30, 2007, 06:27 PM »

Darwin, any chance you're running PS Tray Factory? I don't have anything concrete but I always felt it degraded my system performance. Just checked explorer.exe in Process Viewer and it's using 20,744 K (private bytes) - all my usual apps are running and I have over 20 icons in my system tray. Two explorer.exe instances is something I've never ~~encountered~~ noticed, BTW. Wonder if it has anything to do with a 3rd party file manager integrating itself into the system...

Darwin · « **Reply #28 on:** November 30, 2007, 07:13 PM »

nosh - yes I do run PS Tray Factory and I have [cough][ahem]quite a few[/ahem][/cough] 3rd party file managers installed... Anyway, thanks! I'll follow up on those suggestions

Darwin · « **Reply #29 on:** November 30, 2007, 08:04 PM »

You were right - it was PSTrayFactory driving up explorer.exe's RAM usage. I can live with it, particularly as I now know what is causing it. No idea what caused the duplicate explorer.exe to be running. I shutdown the one consuming lower resources (at the time it was using about 40MB RAM) and nothing happened - ie my desktop, tray and taskbar remained in place. I rebooted and tried running each of the 3rd party file managers that I have installed in turn and the duplicate explorer.exe didn't re-appear. A mystery... I wonder if explorer.exe crashed and two different apps tried to restart it simultaneously? Just a random thought.

Nighted · « **Reply #30 on:** November 30, 2007, 10:51 PM »

Darwin, I was seeing that same behavior not long ago (2 explorer processes). I also use PS Tray Factory but I don't think it was the culprit. QT Address Bar or TabBar maybe? I dunno....

Darwin · « **Reply #31 on:** November 30, 2007, 11:12 PM »

Heh, heh - I have QT Address Bar and Tabbar installed as well. Oddly enough (OK, stupidly enough) I didn't actually fire up Windows Explorer when I tested all those 3rd party file managers (for obvious reasons). Right off to follow up on that...

Darwin · « **Reply #32 on:** November 30, 2007, 11:13 PM »

Bingo! Another mystery solved - thanks

In this case the second instance of explorer.exe shutdown with Windows Explorer - I guess last time was just a glitch (or more likely I tried to use some feature of QTTabbar/AddressBar whatever and it hung in the background?).

Nighted · « **Reply #33 on:** December 01, 2007, 12:43 AM »

Darwin: [attach]

blarson · « **Reply #34 on:** December 01, 2007, 11:23 AM »

WinPatrol caught four new Vista services. Bill Pytlovany has an explanation of them in his blog:

http://billpstudios.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-xp-sp3-includes-four-new.html

nosh · « **Reply #35 on:** December 01, 2007, 12:49 PM »

Darwin, glad you got a few things cleared out.

Do check the command line for both explorer.exe processes in Process Explorer just to make sure it's not something else running as Explorer. It's highly unlikely but nice to know for sure anyway.

Darwin · « **Reply #36 on:** December 01, 2007, 12:53 PM »

Good advice, nosh, thanks. I've haven't seen the second instance of explorer.exe since yesterday, but will follow up as you suggest if and when I do

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #37 on:** December 02, 2007, 12:05 AM »

Also, any processes running as "Exploder" should be flagged as suspicious.

Darwin · « **Reply #38 on:** December 04, 2007, 01:12 AM »

So, back to XP Sp-3 RC-1, any updates from Nighted and blarson as to stability?

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #39 on:** December 04, 2007, 01:59 AM »

And if we don't hear from them soon, should we be worried?

:-)

kfitting · « **Reply #40 on:** December 04, 2007, 03:13 AM »

This won't be objective by any means, but SP3 seems to make XP less sluggish... more like an initial install before you muck everything up by installing antivirus/firewall, and other always-running programs. I have't had a crash yet (3 days).

Like I said, not objective... but I like SP3 so far.

Kevin

Darwin · « **Reply #41 on:** December 04, 2007, 04:13 AM »

Thanks Kevin - good to know!

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #42 on:** December 04, 2007, 04:16 AM »

Very cool. I'm feeling something weird right now. It's... optimism.

I can't *wait* for SP3 now!

Nighted · « **Reply #43 on:** December 04, 2007, 04:39 AM »

No real problems so far. The only time I've crashed explorer is when running wonky programs. Nothing unusual there. The crashes I'm not getting, as in those caused from mysterious memory issues seem to not be appearing. As I posted over on the nLite forums, I think I'll be sticking with SP3 from this RC until the final.

Nothing has exploded so far....nor have I smashed anything in days.

SKA · « **Reply #44 on:** December 04, 2007, 05:31 AM »

Dear Nighted

Could you give brief specs of your PC (Processor, RAM, Video card & Video RAM, motherboard brand & list of main softwares installed) - hope its not to much to ask <grin> ?

Thanks sincerely for your kindly trying RC1 out !
SKA

blarson · « **Reply #45 on:** December 04, 2007, 11:49 AM »

Microsoft has published the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Overview as a PDF.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=68c48dad-bc34-40be-8d85-6bb4f56f5110&DisplayLang=en

f0dder · « **Reply #46 on:** December 04, 2007, 12:39 PM »

Thanks for that link, blarson, will read when I'm back from shopping

jgpaiva · « **Reply #47 on:** December 04, 2007, 02:39 PM »

Thanks a lot blarson! I will definitelly read that to know what i'm missing out

Darwin · « **Reply #48 on:** December 04, 2007, 03:09 PM »

Thanks blarson - I've now had a chance to read the pdf - interesting. Doesn't (to my not necessarily well informed mind) provide any hints as to the performance boost. I wonder if in addition to everything else, it removes/disables by default, some of the services that are set to run automatically in earlier versions of XP?

f0dder · « **Reply #49 on:** December 04, 2007, 03:18 PM »

Hm, the list of that PDF is pretty ho-humm-whatever, and certainly doesn't explain the "OMFG 10% SPEED GAIN!11!" claim, but there's probably other little changes and tweaks not mentioned in the pdf.

We'll see