Microsoft Releases Windows XP SP3 to Manufacturing -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Releases Windows XP SP3 to Manufacturing

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) has been released to manufacturing, according to a post on Microsoft TechNet.

By Kurt Mackie
04/21/2008

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) has been released to manufacturing, according to a post on Microsoft TechNet. Current SP3 recipients include original equipment manufacturers and enterprise customers.

Next in line to get the latest update to Microsoft's venerable XP operating system will be TechNet participants, who will gain access to XP SP3 on April 29 via Windows Update and the Microsoft Download Center. Microsoft also plans to release online documentation on that date.

Home users of Windows XP will be able to get SP3 sometime in early summer via automatic update, according to the post. That release date likely will be June 10, according to an internal Microsoft schedule that the Neowin.net Web site claimed to have obtained. The site first broke initial rumors of the release that turned out to be true.

XP SP3 contains past service pack functionality, but it's expected to be a relatively light upgrade. Highlights of the release include a network access protection update to support new features in the Windows Server 2008 operating system, plus an improved way to tell if routers are discarding packets, according to Microsoft's white paper (PDF) on the topic. It may also have improved performance over XP Service Pack 2.

SP3 will be Microsoft's final service pack for Windows XP, which is the company's most widely used operating system. Microsoft will stop selling Windows XP licenses for new PCs on June 30, 2008. However, for certain new low-tech PCs, Windows XP licensing will be extended to approximately June 30, 2010.

Buyers of state-of-the-art Windows-based PCs will have to use Microsoft's current OS, Windows Vista, after Microsoft ends XP licensing.

Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates has hinted that Vista's successor, Windows 7, could appear as early as 2009.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.