The following is a post made by user "MrMaguire" on Greyghost regarding the un-official updating procedure

MrMaguire in an earlier post wrote:
I've been thinking about the Unofficial Service Pack 5. How necessary do you suppose it really is? The Windows 2000 install media that I use actually has all (if not most) of the official updates slipstreamed into it. I've noticed that after installing USP 5.1, some of the slipstreamed components (such as .NET Framework 2) are missing. I did a test build of Windows 2000 today in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (don't laugh, It's better than VMware for a lot of things, especially Windows 98), this time I didn't install the Unofficial Service Pack 5. I installed Update Rollup 2, Unofficial Update Rollup, the extras and add-ons, made my own changes to the registry and then installed the .NET Framework package which includes every version from 1 to 4, all in that order. The installation went along without event and Windows seems happy. Oh, except that shell32.dll error occurred, for the exact same reason too.

I'm still kinda wondering what benefit exactly the Unofficial Service Pack 5 has now. The way I see things: back in the day (2006, I think), having all of those post-SP4 updates incorporated into one package would've been advantageous. But now, as long as Windows 2000 is already up to date when the unofficial packages are installed, what's the point? Maybe I'm missing something, I'm just assuming that USP 5 was designed with update convenience in mind. As a side note, I remember going through the same thought process that uxwbill did about running Windows Update after the installation of USP 5.1. I think that's the specific stage that tomasz86 recommended doing it at.

There may be more to this than I first thought. Recently I was browsing MSFN and found a thread about the functionality of Windows 2000's USB drivers and their revisions.

pointertovoid on MSFN forum wrote:
These patches aren't highly publicized by Microsoft (most were intended for an SP5 that was never published) and don't appear in automatic updates, so such a list isn't very common despite the patches may improve USB function for some users.

Microsoft's warning in these patches' descriptions is that they haven't been tested enough, so one should use them only if experiencing the specific undesired behaviour that a patch cures. Anyway, at least we'll know they exist.

[...]

The wise users of Gurgelmeyer's unofficial SP5 have all these files already in their latest possible versions - at least, this is what I saw in its i386 folder without having installed the uSP5. The only exception is Usbport.sys at v6926 instead of v6941, which is hard to explain, as only KB843503 brings Openhci.sys v6940 present in uSp5 and this KB843503 brings Usbport.sys v6941 as well. As a consequence, the uSp5 may benefit from KB843503.


If I'm reading that correctly, the Unofficial Service Pack 5(.1) has these newer USB drivers from Microsoft already integrated into it. If it has those relatively unpublicized drivers that don't appear in automatic updates, what else might it have? Gurgelmeyer was obviously very knowledgeable of Microsoft products and practices, maybe there's more. BUT, once again, we're stopped by the fact that documentation really isn't available.

I would recommend that the Unofficial Service Pack 5.1 be installed, especially if your Windows 2000 installation media doesn't have all of the official updates integrated into it, like mine does (maybe not all in the sense that some obscure updates may be missing). I'm pretty sure that the package has been updated since Gurgelmeyer's original releases back in 2006, after all, the .1 has to be significant somehow.

Of course my reasoning behind my recommendation is because newer files - especially from Microsoft - must be better files. For keeping Windows 2000 available as a somewhat current operating system, that has been the name of the game so far.