Windows XP SP3

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.