I am thinking about doing a full system recovery on my HP Pavilion 763n, which will put me back to XP SP1. I have the service pack CD's for both SP2 and SP3. Several questions: 1. Once I am back at SP1, will I be able to get the critical updates prior to putting on the other service packs? (Is SP1 supported by Microsoft?). If not, will I have problems after putting on the service packs if I don't have the critical updates on first? 2. Should I put on SP2 and then apply the critical updates before putting on SP3, or should I go directly from SP1 to SP3?

Service Pack 3 contains ALL the updates after SP1 up to the release date of SP3. All you need to do is install WinXP sp1, apply SP3, install your Firewall and use Windows Update to get the post SP3 updates.

All you need is to install SP1 and then install SP3. You can skip installing SP2.