Over the weekend I decided to go ahead and try the final release of SP3 on my test machine to see how it worked. It is always exciting to try something new, especially when in the back of your mind you are thinking ‘I hope this works right’. Anyway, over at ZD-Net they have a link for the RTM version of SP3 for Windows XP, which is designed to update multiple versions of XP, if you need to do so.

There has been some discussion whether this is the full RTM version or not, but it seems that this issues has been finally put to rest. This does appear to be the final and ready to go. A word of caution. Microsoft has pulled this release since there were some issues with some of their other software, so be careful. You may wish to wait until SP3 is available through Windows update. But that is up to you.

The download was fairly quick running at over 300kbps. I then burned the file to CD and installed it on my test box. The install, with reboots and other standard stuff took about an hour. I really didn’t time it since I was doing other stuff while SP3 installed itself. The installation was a non event and my system booted up normally. I checked some of my apps and all seemed to work well.

Is there any performance increases using SP3? None that I could see. As most have previously reported, this is basically a roll up of all previous fixes and patches released my Microsoft over the past few years since SP2 was released. That’s about it. Nothing Earth shattering to write home about.

Caution: I would wait until Microsoft releases SP3 to the masses. Just my 2 cents.

ZD-Net site is here.

Comments welcome.

PS There is no official date as to when Microsoft will release SP3 to the masses.

[tags]windows xp, sp3, download, install, upgrade, patches, fixes, cd, burn, disk, update, [/tags]