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Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Windows XP Service Pack 3 - Initial Impressions

According to Microsoft, XP SP3 isn't even supposed to see a public release until April 29, but, well...let's just say there are ways to get it early *cough* TORRENTS *cough*.
Here's a little proof of purchase:

To be honest, there's nothing really new. I mean, yes, there are some obscure features that the average user won't give a damn about, but SP3 is nowhere near as sweeping as SP2 was. It's more of an update to give XP a new lease on life, which is good news for those with crap boxes, as well as XP diehards. Some people are also saying that their machines are a bit faster, but I haven't noticed any difference.

As with any major update or service pack, any modded system files will be lost - e.g. the uxtheme.dll hack and the tcpip.sys half-open patch. After a bit of Googling I found a Build 5512 uxtheme.dll at Neowin.

Unfortunately, no tcpip.sys patchers seem to exist for SP3, so heavy P2Pers, you may want to hold off until that's also updated.

And for the inpatient...here are some download links - go fetch!

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