In general, you have a valid point. Windows 2000
Professional is such a complex system that the likelyhood
of a "home user" running into one of the exact issues
addressed by a service pack is relatively small.
However, that being said, I would definately recommend
applying service packs because Microsoft, being the high
profile company that it is, is constantly targeted by your
friendly neighborhood hacker or virus engineer.
Therefore, Microsoft does invest a high degree of effort
into finding and repairing many of their security holes.
You will not likely find a third party software company
who does more to plug the Microsoft security holes,
although Microsoft probably outsources this.
As far as your system running slower since the update, it
is hard to say what would be causing this. I would not
suspect the service pack as being the only cause. It does
appear to be contributing to your performance
degredation. Service Pack 4 is relatively new. I have
not seen any performance degradation myself nor have I
seen it on other systems... yet. I would not discount it
though. There are some monitoring tools in Windows 2000
that might narrow down the cause for you. The performance
tab in the Task Manager is one place to start. There is
the performance monitor in Control Panel, Administrative
Tools.
