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.