Microsoft has released to the public a near-final version of a major update to its Windows XP operating system.

Windows XP SP3 Release Candidate Now Available To Public

One feature should prove popular with corporate IT managers, who often need to oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of operating system installations.

Microsoft has released to the public a near-final version of a major update to its Windows XP operating system.
As of Wednesday, the 'Release Candidate' for Windows XP Service Pack 3 was available as a 336 Mbyte download from Microsoft's Web site. The software had previously been available only to participants in Microsoft's official test programs.

Software vendors usually issue a release candidate when they're close to producing a final version of a product or update. It provides a last chance for users to weigh in before a final version is released to manufacturing.

Microsoft says it considers the Release Candidate for Windows XP SP3 to be trial software and warns users to download with caution -- and at their own risk. "Microsoft does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission critical systems," the company states on its Web site.

For the adventurous, however, Windows XP SP3 Release Candidate offers a number of enhancements over the current version of the OS. It includes all updates issued since Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released in 2004, and some new elements.

Among them: A feature called Network Access Protection that's borrowed from the newer Windows Vista operating system. NAP automatically validates a computer's "health," ensuring that it's free of bugs and viruses, before allowing it access to a network.

Windows XP SP3 also includes improved "black hole" router detection -- a feature that automatically detects routers that are silently discarding packets. In XP SP3, the feature is turned on by default, according to Microsoft.

Windows XP SP 3 also steals a page from Vista's product activation model, meaning that product keys for each copy of the operating system doesn't need to be entered during setup. The feature should prove popular with corporate IT managers, who often need to oversee hundreds, or even thousands, of operating system installations.

Microsoft is in a bit of a Catch-22 with XP. The more it strengthens the OS, the less reason users have to upgrade to the newer Windows Vista, which by many accounts has failed to catch on with computer users in both the home and office since it debuted in January.

A final version of Windows XP SP3 is expected to ship early next year.

Windows XP SP3 Reaches Release Candidate Status


Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 has exited its beta phase and entered Release Candidate phase. As usual, it is now available for download publicly. This Release Candidate is build 3264.

"While Windows Vista provides the most advanced security and management capabilities of any Windows operating system, Windows XP SP3 will ensure PCs running Windows XP will have the latest updates, as well as compatibility with the Network Access Protection functionality of Windows Server 2008," Microsoft said in a statement.

The new Service Pack 3 for Microsoft's previous operating system will feature more than 1,000 hot fixes and patches that have been issued in the past three years, as well as at least four new features, some of which will be ports of Vista tools.

Previous builds of the software update had previously been available only to participants in Microsoft's official test program, but now it's readily available to the public here.

Last month, testers over at Devil Mountain Software have analyzed the performance of Windows XP Service Pack 3 build 3244 and found that "testing with OfficeBench showed an ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP w/Service Pack 2."

Windows XP Service Pack 3 build 3244 was also twice as fast as Windows Vista in the OfficeBench benchmark program. They used a Dell XPS M1710 laptop with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM and nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video, running Microsoft Office 2007.