Windows XP Service Pack #3 Beta - Review

Being on vacation for a week meant that upon my return, I had some toys to play with which included trying out Service Pack #3 Beta on my test box. I must admit I always have some thoughts about whether being one of the first guinea pigs to try something new, especially since my test box with XP SP2 runs so well. The other thought is that I recall the problems some folks had with SP2 when it first came out and it does make one wonder how well SP3 is going to fair. Also what exactly was SP3 going to do to make my system better? These are the thoughts I had as I sat patiently for the download to complete, which was some 335MB in size.

The first download appeared to be successful, but the burn process failed. So I deleted the first files and tried a second download which was successful. The second burn was successful and I proceeded with the installation. [I should note I made an image before doing the install] As with previous service packs, a system configuration check is made,a restore point is made and previous install files are backed up. It took about 12 minutes to install the service pack. This is the part we all hate. Waiting for the system to reboot. Again, you always have the thoughts in the back of your mind that something may go wrong. However the system booted without incident and all appeared well. That is always a good start.

I should note that my test system is Windows XP Pro with SP2 and ALL fixes, updates, repairs, and so forth are in place.

So what happened after the system fired back up? Was there blazing fast performance? Super changes that would make life on my system more bearable? Sorry folks. Nothing like that happened. In fact I had to hunt around to figure out what changes were made. Of course reading the release notes also helped some.

Let’s see. In Control Panel there is a better description of what security settings are available and could help some folks avoid settings that are incorrect. I already had previously installed Internet Explorer 7 and Media Player 11, so these were the same. Since I had already installed very fix that Microsoft has previously come out with, nothing much there was changed. Hold on, I’m still looking.

SP3 does add support level 1 cryptography basically for developers. There is also improvement in TCP to assist in keeping connections alive with out the performance hit this detection previously caused. This is an improvement over previous versions Which is odd because previously this was turned off as the default setting.
There are also some administrative and developer enhancements.

But overall there is nothing earth shattering about the new Service Pack. If you have kept up with the updates and are using IE 7 and Media Player 11, you may not notice much of a difference at all. Most enhancements are behind the scenes improvements that most casual Windows users may not notice. That doesn’t mean you won’t want to install SP3.

One side note. It seems because of the release of Vista SP1, Server 2008 that SP3 will now be released in the second quarter of 2008. Also this will be the last service pack for XP.

Second side note. Some users of Windows Media Center are reporting some minor issues. This should be corrected before the final release. I am also not sure if IE7 and Media Player 11 are installed by default with the SP3 upgrade. I already had them on my test system. I’m sure that since this is only a beta version, some things will be changed if problems occur.

Comments welcome.

[tags]windows, xp, service pack 3, sp3, enhancements, [/tags]