Microsoft pub­licly released Win­dows XP Ser­vice Pack 3 yes­ter­day, which means that it should appear in your list of avail­able updates. To grab your own stand­alone copy of the update, down­load the EXE or the ISO directly from Microsoft. Life­hacker also has a tuto­r­ial on get­ting SP3 onto a Win­dows install disc to save your­self loads of trou­ble later. Read what Ars Tech­nica, Life­hacker, and Wired have to say about the upgrade.

This ser­vice pack was rumored in Novem­ber (by Wired and CNET, among oth­ers) to offer a 10% boost in speed, but who knows under what con­di­tions it’ll actu­ally be notice­able. And all this amidst protests against Microsoft’s plan to stop sell­ing XP this sum­mer. Even John Dvo­rak, whose columns I’ve been read­ing since ado­les­cence, hates Vista:

You’re not sup­posed to deliver a new oper­at­ing sys­tem that’s been in devel­op­ment for more than four years yet per­forms worse than the pre­vi­ous OS. Per­for­mance should be at the top, not the bot­tom, of the to-do list. You get the sense that Microsoft just piles code on top of code and some­where in the mid­dle of it all is MS-DOS 1.0.

I’ll say.