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Windows XP SP3

Although the number of MAC users is slowly increasing, Windows is by far the dominant Operating System in the market today. Many people have upgraded to Windows Vista but Windows XP is still the household favourite for most intermediate level computer users. Although Vista has been hailed by many as a positive step forward, not everyone appreciates a change that requires you to make a hardware upgrade. And now there is more reason to stay with the XP version; originally released in May, service pack three (SP3) has now been selected for automatic roll out to all legal XP owners.

As long as you have ‘automatic updates’ selected, your XP will download anything between 67MB and 300MB depending on how clean and up-to-date you keep your system. This is mainly because SP3 is purely a selection of patches and performance updates. There is also some alleged code optimisation included in SP3 and some new functionality, including ‘Network Access Protection’ (NAP).

There has been little promotion for this SP release, mainly due to the fact Microsoft is about to release a huge marketing campaign for Windows Vista in order to improve its public image. It would make no sense for the PC giant to push XP SP3 at the same time as Vista because they want users to upgrade. Either way, fear not, installing SP3 should only leave you with warm and fuzzy feelings and it won’t break your computer.

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