If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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