[laumars]

SP2 wasn’t released until 3 years into the life of XP. Windows 2000 would have been roughly 5 years old by that point and hardware would have caught up with XPs requirements somewhat so upgrading to XP was a more reasonable choice.

I was talking more about when XP was new.

The Command Prompt tweaks were a 2000 improvement IIRC but I do recall Task Manager and Control Panel receiving updates in the first edition of XP.

Not taking anything away from your core point though. There definitely were tweaks in the early releases of XP that many would have liked. It just wasn’t worth the extra CPU and memory footprint for me and by the time SP2 had arrived I’d switched to Linux full time so never bothered to upgrade from 2000.