Reloaded my system... which hotfixes are absolutely necessary?

[FastRedPonyCar]

As the title implies, I reloaded my system (XP pro w/sp2) yesterday. I reloaded a few other pc's as well and noticed a pretty substancial slowdown in the windows loading process as well as a slight degradation of overall windows performance after I ran the windows update on the machines.

I don't know what the users are going to be doing with the machines so I just loaded all the available updates, sans IE7. I skipped .net 1.1 and just loaded .net 2.0 framework as they did say it was required for some program they use.


Anyways, that being said, I've yet to install any hotfixes on my own machine so it's a fresh XP and whatever SP2 entails. Which ones do I need and which ones do I not need? I know there's a hotfix that I think is supposed to improve dual core CPU performance or something like that but what else would be considered "must haves"? BTW, My system does require .Net 2.0 as well.

I know a lot of the hotfixes address software vulnerablities but I only use office for word and excel, I use threatfire and norton av as well as zonealarm.

[Absolution]

windows updates don't really slow computers.... they are put out there because they are updates to either security fixes or functionality.

get all the high priority updates. recommended updates you can pick and choose, but mind you, once again, they are there to do something


specifically, like the .NET framework, you can't run 1.1 framework programs with just the 2.0 framework, I believe you need both (otherwise they wouldn't offer both and I've personally ran into problems that says you need the framework)

[FastRedPonyCar]

well, it's one of my recording programs needs 2.0 framework to load some effects table structure or something that I never use but is required for the install.

I'm not sure what all the updates did but those systems that got the full updates done take substancially longer to load windows and feel just a bit sluggish compared to before the updates.