Has anyone installed sp3 for winxp yet? And if so, did you computer explode?
My one worry is that programs that look specifically for sp2 might get confused with sp3.

Where do you download sp3 from?

I tried it awhile back. It's not horrible but it's definitely not stable. I would just wait until the real release which is suppose to be soon. (?!)

That's unless Microshaft is trying to fuck up XP so people go to Vista or something.

Oh, FFS... As if getting to SP2 wasn't hard enough. Microsoft's updating software sucks balls >=(

I just ran Windows Update today. I didn't see SP3. (I do everything manually) Is it still in beta or something?

I think I heard it would be out on Windows Update on the 29^th. If that info's right, this patch Tuesday is gonna be busy.

It's still in beta, but I think they might have finished it. I don't know. There's nothing new if you have been keeping up on updates.

I reinstalled xp and it came up directly after sp2. It did make it easier updating stuff.
I read some more and it's mostly just all the present security features bundled.

SP3 went RTM today, which means it's done. I'm pretty sure you can download it off Microsoft's site.
Service packs never really add features, SP2 being the exception. They're usually just a bunch of patches.

http://www.winsupersite.com/faq/xp_sp3.asp
More information.

SP3 only really contains a lot of bug fixes. They didn't add any new features (like the wireless manager in SP2).

It's actually mostly a rollup of previous bugfixes, not many new ones. It does include a couple of things imported from vista, like auto UPNP device detection.

Eh, its not so impressive. I actually hate it ><

What reason could you possibly have to hate a collection of patches?

Its not that useful and disabled some features that I kinda liked.

What did it disable?

Uh oh. This'll be trouble.
I had a very bad experience with XP SP3:
I use VMware, so I created a Windows XP SP3 VMachine. To my horror, the whole thing basically exploded about halfway through boot (something was wrong...), then started normally, like a good XP SP pack. At login, the whole password system was corrupted, and so, logging in was difficult, with the username in the middle of the page and the password at the very top of the screen!!!

After about 2 days of waiting for the login to end, I gave ulp and erased the VMWare machine, took the XP SP3 disk back and got SP2 instead.

That might have something to do with the fact that you were using a virtual machine.

It could have, but if I had to guess whether it was window's error or vmware's error, I'll guess it was window's.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9080358&source=rss_news50
It wouldn't be released it that happened everyt ime.