What can I say? For me, XP SP3 was the cat’s meow, the best Windows client operating system ever. But, for other people ‘upgrading’ to XP SP 3 is like being fed to a roaring lion.
They’re seeing endless, and I mean endless-reboots. Many can’t even escape to the relative safety of Windows’ Safe mode much less get back to the safe harbor of a previously saved System Restore point. Most of the people experiencing this PC nightmare seem to be running computers with AMD chips.
The core problem though isn’t that XP SP3 has a problem with AMD processors. It’s that some vendors, and HP is the one that usually gets mentioned, used the same XP image on both their Intel and AMD systems. Usually that’s not a problem. It’s sloppy workmanship at the factory, but not a show-stopper. Well, until now anyway.