Windows XP Service Pack 3

For those of you who have not jumped over to Vista (and yes there are many out there), Microsoft has released the final Service Pack today for download. There is no obvious new functionality with this release, for the end user anyway. It is a collection of all the past bug fixes and some stuff has changed under the hood a little bit, but nothing major. It is not a life altering experience that will render your machine into a paper weight (at least so far thats been the experience). Its relatively uneventful installing it, I just did my computer during lunch. So, if you want it now head over to the MS download center and snag a copy (its 316mb in size), or just wait until June when it gets rolled out via Windows Update. You do have Windows Update enabled don’t you?

Updated info: Seems the boys in Redmond found a problem with some obscure retail configuration with Windows XP so they have pulled the file for now. That probably will not have any ill effects for consumer versions though so if you have it installed (like me) no worries.

Windows Vista SP1 now public

Paul Thurrott just posted on his blog that the much awaited Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is now available for public download. For those of you who are adventurous you can get it from the MS Download center (32bit or 64bit). These are fairly large downloads it looks like so low bandwidth folks should expect this could take a while to get. The 32bit is 434 mb and 64 bit clocks in at a whopping 762mb.

UPDATE: Its been widely reported that some installations are breaking peoples systems. So install at your own risk!