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Today is the day I have been waiting for for a few months now as Microsoft has released windows XP SP3.

You can get it now from Windows Update by clicking to this Microsoft Download Link

The latest service pack is really mostly a bunch of bug fixes all rolled up into one package but I have found on all of the PCs that I have installed it on that it seems to have sped them up, not a lot perhaps but still the operating system is a little faster. The other great thing about the new Windows XP Service Pack 3 is that now we can do installs of Windows XP a lot faster. The last few installs that I have done have taken about three hours because even with an install of Windows XP with Service pack 2 there are still about 92 updates as well as that huge Internet Explorer 7 change.

so I can rejoice to this Service Pack upgrade for Windows XP today but this will probably be that last one as Microsoft will now start pushing hard to get rid of Windows XP in favor of Windows Vista.

By the way There is still some life left for support of Windows XP support will go on for a few years yet. Mainstream regular support will go until April 14, 2009, after that date Windows XP will begin its “Extended Support” period that will last for 5 years until April 8, 2014.

Well I downloaded the release candidate for Windows XP Service Pack 3 and installed it on both a VM and a secondary XP Pro machine and it seems to have passed the boot up test. I will be testing more today but so far the only differences between the SP3 RC and my old Windows XP SP2 is the computer performance, which is much faster then it was before and the loss of my address bar in the Windows Taskbar.

I  have been looking at the documentation that Microsoft has on the technet site and there is very little about what will bse included in the Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. It looks like we get a rollup of all the service packs, patches and security updates but there is no auto update to Internet Explorer 7. The Release Candidate for XP SP3 includes the updates to Internet Explorer 6 as well as anything for Internet Explorer 7.

Microsoft is very clear that there are almost no new enhancements in SP3. After the raft of changes a few years ago with Service Pack 2 this is a bit of a disappointment but I am sure that Microsoft would much rather have us all move to Vista then to continue with Windows XP