[toyg]

I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP. It was already dominant, and it's mostly remembered as "legendary" because it had become the target platform for every hardware and software vendor on the planet. Windows 98 was too flaky to engender any serious friction to upgrades, and Windows 2000 was not consumer-friendly enough; XP effectively unified the consumer and professional desktop markets, and became the gold standard.

SP2, if anything, slowed down adoption, since it threw a bunch of spanners in the way of third-party code. It was probably necessary, just to stem the flow of bad press, but no mean a key in XP's overall success.

[IFC_LLC]

It was not that bad. I remember when SP fixed a bunch of issues with bluetooth, and windows CD burning program was better than any of the Nero Burning ROMs, cause those became unusable overbloated.

[steve1977]

Also, technically XP was Windows NT 5.1, so it was built on a solid basis.

Whereas 98 was still in the kinda DOS-based 9x line.

And I fully agree with you to not mention Windows Me.

[toyg]

Windows Me was some weird marketing attempt at squeezing more life out of the dead-end '9x line. I honestly don't know who, in their sane mind, would ever pay for such a thing.

[hulitu]

> I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP

The general knowledge was to wait until the SP were stable. This was hard. 4.0 had SP6, 2k had SP4.

[toyg]

I guess it depends on the industry, but most people would happily run anything that had undergone a single round of patching. And plenty were so obsessed with the latest and greatest that they would jump at .0 releases without a care in the world - which is how Vista got its reputation, for example (the .0 was pretty bad, and by the time both builds and ecosystems had improved, people had decided to stay away).

[hulitu]

> I don't think SP2 made much of a difference in the popularity of XP

SP1 was buggy as hell.