Come on Microsoft, stop holding out on us. We want our XP SP3!
I’ve been running Windows XP3 since release candidate 1 was made available to TechNet members on December 3, 2007. And you know what? It just works.
I reviewed XP SP3 RC1, not long after it was out. I was impressed. This version of XP is faster, has improved security and, in the months since then, it has proven to be the most stable version of Windows I’ve ever had the pleasure of using on a desktop.
I have now switched my last copy of XP running on native hardware to SP3, and all my other copies, which live on in Linux desktops thanks to VirtualBox and VMware Player, are also running XP SP3. This was a no-brainer. XP SP3, even though it has not been released yet and is now up to XP SP3 RC2 Refresh (Read RC3 for all practical purposes), is just better.
So, why can’t you have it? That’s a darn good question.
Vista SP1, which is available to all now, is still more of a pain than a useful operating system. I have, as I wrote recently, finally gotten Vista to run properly on one PC after 16 months. The longest it took me to get XP SP3 to run properly was two hours.