well sp3 has alot better features than sp2, btw depending on what version of the mac os you have xp may run alot cleaner and faster, i'm not personally a fan of macintosh but i have used macintosh in school for things like video editing and picture editing and i do have to say, for media applications macintosh knows what they're doing when it comes to that so expect that if you do alot of photo/video editing you're going to have to find alot of good alternatives on xp otherwise you'll be disappointed