Unfortunately, I'm not a very computer savvy person, so I'm not sure how big a problem this is or how it affects my computer in the long run, but:
I was prompted to begin the WinXP Service Pack 3 update today. Everything went fine until the progress meter froze at about 75% and remained there (with the note that it's "finishing installation - performing cleanup"), while the memory kept going down. The Service Pack itself is listed as being around 1.5GB, yet my memory went down 5GB and continued until there was around 800MB left on my hard drive. After 40 minutes, I received an error message that the installer wasn't responding and to end the process. Immediately after this, the memory went back up and kept going up until reaching 20.7GB. Before the update installation, there was around 5.7GB left, so I have no idea what happened to that 15GB or so in the process. I restarted the computer and everything seems to be working properly: all files are here, software and Windows-related programs are working fine. Unfortunately, the System Restore Point made before the installation (and all those before it) seems to no longer exist, so I can't set the computer back to before. Is there some way of finding out exactly what happened to that 15GB, if there was any permanent damage done to my computer, and how can I fix it?
Thanks so much for your help and let me know if I need to include any more information.