MS Service Pack 3 Won’t Install

Today, I was given an older Dell Laptop to reinstall Windows XP.  Used the recovery discs that they provide and 30 minutes later, the laptop is up and running, almost.   I had to service pack it and since Microsoft recently released service pack 3, I figured I will download that and patch the whole thing all at once, or so I thought.  Turns out, the version of XP I had is pre-service pack 1 and I got the following error:

“Setup has detected that the version of Service Pack installed on your system is lower than what is necessary to apply this hotfix.

At minimum, you must have Service Pack 1 installed.”

People who know me can attest that I’m not one to partake in bashing Microsoft but this is ridicules and kind of a microcosm of what they are doing wrong in Redmond.  You would think that with all the billions of dollars and resources at their disposal, they could write a service pack that could be applied to any version of Windows.  Guess not!  At least this isn’t the frustration that I felt when I first installed SP2 back in the day.  Now, I gotta find my “good” SP2 disc that I thought I didn’t need anymore.