it is going to be happening soon(July) and to keep getting your regular security updates you will have to have sp3. There is a post here about that I will find it and post the link. I gave the links for the best way to go ahead and do the install for sp3 which will be the safest way and hopefully the successful way

here is that thread, read through it and you will find the links I provide and the directions for how to prepare for the install.
Service Pack 3

Thanks, Ravencajun. Before I saw those careful instructions, my daughter's PC was prompting to install SP3 - so I did (about a week ago). At first I thought we got lucky and all went well. She has so little on her computer that I thought it was a good place to start.

However, now she's getting flickering - if that's the right word for it. For instance, she's looking at her inbox in gmail - and it keeps scrolling over and over so she isn't able to click on one email and open it. It's also scrolling too quickly to hit the sign out button. Ultimately I hit alt-cont-delete to end gmail. I believe we saw this flickering in another program the other day - it seems that little green boxes were flashing at points along the screen.

I realize this may have nothing to do with SP3. So I should probably mention, she has a dell dimension 4500 - 40GB hard drive, 768 MB Ram, Firefox browser. It's possible all the trouble has come within the Firefox browser - I'm not sure. Anything else that might need fixing or updating that could cause this.

Thanks.
Lynn.

If you get SP3, you will get 4 more years of updates...

Lynn try going to start then mozilla in your programs and choose firefox safe mode and see if that makes any difference if so then it is one of the add ons that may not be working well with the update. You might try also a removal of firefox and a re-install to see if the problem resolves.

Try going into your mouse settings (control panel) and see if anything there has changed, the speed of the mouse gestures etc.

In firefox check to see if you have auto scrolling enabled and smooth scroll enabled they will be under tools options and the advanced tab general tab. I have both enabled on mine. You may try with and with out those enabled.

and of course you know that is pretty low on RAM and sp3 is more resource heavy which could be one issue.

I do not know what you mean by little green boxes flashing can you tell me more about that?

This seems to be my idea for dealing with technical maintenance. We have Comcast issues, Tivo issues, (plumbing issues - albeit not technical). I'm triaging - so I probably won't get to my daughter's computer today. I appreciate the suggestions, Raven.

I actually bought more RAM for her computer - but it's never the most pressing thing for me to do - and it wasn't a problem with sp2. maybe that will be next weekend's task.

I don't know how to describe little green boxes. I'd say small rectangles - 1/2 inch square or so - were flickering - appearing and disappearing along parts of the page. I can't recall what program was open when that happened. Don't know if it was skype or gmail - whether it was via Firefox or not. It's not doing it now but I'll pay better attention so I can describe it if it occurs again.'

Thanks.
Lynn.