The speed of SP2 (Score 1)

I found that a good deal of the apparent slowness of SP2 comes from the fact that the disk becomes badly fragmented (presumably as a result of deleting and replacing so many small files). Running the disk defragmentation system tool after updating a system to SP2 substantially improves the performance of the system. The slowdown seems to be especially prevalent on laptops.

Note that defragmenting the disk before installing SP2 will not help. It must be done after the system has been updated.

I made a /. account just to post this, so I hope someone sees it..