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> For me personally, Windows XP means XP SP2. Anything before that wasn’t worth using.

That is because Microsoft had its own versioning system:

- RC was alpha quality.

- Releases were betas.

and then starting with SP2 one can talk about a released product. NT had 6 SPs, 2000 had 4, XP had 2. Even in Windows 11 they fixed things (taskbar) after release.

This really tells a not so nice story about engineering and quality at Microsoft.

SP2 was largely about security issues. Before then XP was riddled with vulnerabilities.

XP had 3 service packs not 2!

The only thing I remember is that I would never install SP2 because of EULA. I don't remember the specifics though. Around that time I started mostly using Linux anyway.

Yes. XP == SP2 :)