There have been rumours abound for the past week about the possibility of a new service pack coming for Windows XP, and now Microsoft has confirmed that beta testing is underway for a release early next year. There are also claims already emerging of the possible speed and performance boost that SP3 will provide for those of us sticking with XP.

Having completed the first RC (release candidate) for Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft set about starting trials of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3). The preview version, basically a fully featured trial version being beta tested for flaws, has now been released to 15,000 users who will continually give feedback, and report any errors in the upgrade.

Windows XP SP3 will reportedly “feature more than 1,000 hot fixes and patches that have been issued in the past three years, as well as at least four new features, some of which will be ports of Vista tools.”

The package is currently 340mb in size, and only available to registered Microsoft beta testers. The finished version is expected to be released sometime in the first half of 2008

Please refer the attachment for screenshot of Window XP SP3

Attached Images

xp-sp3.jpg (32.6 KB, 2 views)

Features backported from Vista, include Network Access Protection (NAP), an enterprise policy enforcement technology that inspects client PCs before they access a corporate network, then updates the machines if necessary or blocks them if they don't meet specified security criteria.