Service Pack 3 for XP?

[History Fan]

Has Microsoft made any announcements about whether they will release a
Service Pack 3 for Windows XP this year? If so, I haven't heard anything,
and Microsoft service packs usually generate a lot of media attention. I
thought perhaps Microsoft would bundle SP3 with the upcoming IE 7. If there
is no SP3 on the horizon, I suppose IE 7 will be released by itself.

 

[S.Sengupta]

I haven't seen any such official announcement from MS.

regards,
ssg MS-MVP

 

[R. McCarty]

Schedule for Service Packs:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/servicepacks.mspx

With Longhorn, IE-7 don't expect a Service Pack anytime soon.
IMO, the next significant update to XP will likely be a Rollup that
backports Longhorn feature sets to XP. Besides XP is now a
mature product and after SP2, there aren't a significant number of
Bug fixes, just the patches for Security exposures and most of
those are IE related.

 

[Joel Rubin]

Has Microsoft made any announcements about whether they will release a
Service Pack 3 for Windows XP this year? If so, I haven't heard anything,
and Microsoft service packs usually generate a lot of media attention. I
thought perhaps Microsoft would bundle SP3 with the upcoming IE 7. If there
is no SP3 on the horizon, I suppose IE 7 will be released by itself.

According to osnn.net there are going to be a buncha big patches for
Windows/Office (some critical) on Tuesday. These seem to come up
sometime around 2000 + GMT. (their afternoon - GMT-7 in summer)

 

[Ken Blake]

In

According to osnn.net there are going to be a buncha big
patches for
Windows/Office (some critical) on Tuesday. These seem to come
up
sometime around 2000 + GMT. (their afternoon - GMT-7 in summer)

The second Tuesday of each month is the regular day for Microsoft
to release patches. There's nothing special about this upcoming
Tuesday, and SP3 won't be released then.

In answer to History Fan's question, no, no information about SP3
has been released. Although it's likely that there may be an SP3,
nobody knows even that for sure. If it is released, nobody knows
when it will be.

 

[History Fan]

When/if a SP3 for Windows XP is released, I'm assuming it will be a
much smaller package than what we experienced with SP2.

Irregardless, I'm looking forward to IE 7, which is supposed to have
RSS feeds and tabbed browsing, not to mention improved security features.
I've tried Firefox, but I still prefer the much-maligned browser from
Microsoft. There are too many websites that only work properly with IE to
make me switch permanently to another browser. Plus I like the look and
feel of IE.

I briefly tried the MSN Toolbar, which adds tabbed browsing to IE. But
the MSN Toolbar package also includes other programs which I don't want or
need. Plus I didn't like how it integrates with IE. With Firefox, if you
want to open a new tab, you merely click the "New Tab" button....or click
File, New Tab. To access tabs with MSN Toolbar, you have to leave the
toolbar open on your screen, which takes up space.

 

[Mark Weinreb]

When/if a SP3 for Windows XP is released, I'm assuming it will be a
much smaller package than what we experienced with SP2.

Not so. Since service packs include all previous service packs, SP3 it will
be larger then SP2.
I've no doubt that it will be available on a CD for the same price as the
SP2 CD (free).

 

[History Fan]

If you download SP3 (whenever it's released), presumably only the files
you need will be downloaded and installed to one's computer. This should
make for a relatively small file size, assuming your computer is already
up-to-date with the latest Microsoft security patches. Whereas SP2 was
almost an entirely new operating system, and quite huge in size.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

Irregardless, I'm looking forward to IE 7, which is
supposed to
have RSS feeds and tabbed browsing, not to mention improved
security
features. I've tried Firefox, but I still prefer the
much-maligned
browser from Microsoft. There are too many websites that only
work
properly with IE to make me switch permanently to another
browser. Plus I like the look and feel of IE.

You might want to consider Maxthon, which is not actually a
different browser, but a shell for IE. It has RSS feeds, tabbed
browsing, and much more. I like it a lot.

http://www.maxthon.com/

 

[Bret Butcher]

I agree. I've been using Maxthon for ages and I'm hooked. I love the
tabbed browing, RSS feeds, and AD and popup blocker. Firefox got
me hooked on tabbed browsing but I never liked the mozilla/netscape
browsers....

 

[Greg Ro]

With Longhorn, IE-7 don't expect a Service Pack anytime soon.
IMO, the next significant update to XP will likely be a Rollup that
backports Longhorn feature sets to XP. Besides XP is now a
mature product and after SP2, there aren't a significant number of
Bug fixes, just the patches for Security exposures and most of
those are IE related.

I thought loghorn was delayed for quite sometime according to some
reports.

Greg Ro