Microsoft's recent pattern may signal that the XP service pack release is imminent.
Two weeks after it last handed a new build of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) to several thousand invitation-only testers, Microsoft Corp. has posted that version for public downloading.
"We're broadening the availability of the release candidate in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3," a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail Tuesday afternoon. Windows XP SP3 RC2 became publicly available last night.
On Feb. 7, Microsoft seeded Release Candidate 2 (RC2) with the 15,000 or so testers who had been working with SP3 for several months. At that time, the company said nothing about taking the version public.
This is just the second time that all Windows XP users have had the chance to try out SP3, the last scheduled major update to the six-year-old operating system. The only other public posting was of SP3 RC in December.
Microsoft, however, followed precedence Tuesday. Earlier this year, it did the same thing -- sent code to its beta testers, then released it to all comers -- during the run-up to finalizing Windows Vista Service Pack 1. In fact, although Microsoft has stuck to the vague schedule of delivering XP SP3 some time in the first half of 2008, Vista's pattern may signal that the XP service pack release is imminent.
Microsoft seeded the RC Refresh build of Vista SP1 on Jan. 11, then two days later posted it for public download. Twenty-two days later, it called a wrap on SP1, saying the code had met its RTM (release to manufacturing) criteria.
Another Vista indictor -- the posting of revised release notes just days before SP1 went RTM -- may also hint at XP SP3 be finished sooner rather than later. Tuesday, Microsoft published the first version of the XP SP3 release notes to its Web site.
Microsoft said that the SP3 RC2 download would be posted on the Microsoft Download Center. A link to it may also appear on this TechNet page.
Once SP3 ships, the next major milestone for Windows XP is June 30, when the popular operating system is slated to fall off the reseller and retail availability list.
Feb 20, 2008
New Windows XP SP3 Build Available for Public Download
Despite SP1, Vista is still slower than XP
Infoworld.com - Posted by Randall Kennedy on February 20, 2008
So here I am, sitting in the main terminal at Dubai International, killing time during my six hour layover by sifting through the headlines surrounding the release Vista SP1. Over at a competitor's site, two prominent bloggers are really going at it, posting contradictory benchmark results that show Vista to be either a) on par with Windows XP or b) much slower than XP on the same hardware.
In each case, the bloggers are focusing on areas in which Microsoft claims to have improved Vista performance with SP1: file copies, network transfers, etc. However, neither author seems be paying attention to the myriad other areas -- productivity applications, services, multimedia tasks -- where Vista is an absolute dog compared to Windows XP.
Did they not read my previous postings on the subject? I made it pretty clear last year that Vista was struggling big time vs. XP on comparable hardware, and that SP1 would be no panacea.
It's like the Microsoft PR machine flipped a switch somewhere and instantly reframed the entire discussion of Vista performance around just those areas it improved on in SP1.
News flash, people: File copying is the least of the problems affecting Windows Vista. Test after test shows that the new OS is a performance slug across the board.
Even when you disable all of the bells and whistles (Aero, Search) and turn-off every conceivable background service (Superfetch, ReadyBoost, etc) -- in other words, strip it down to something comparable to XP in terms of underlying OS footprint -- Vista is still a good 40 percent slower than XP on a variety of basic productivity tasks.
The only solution to this generalized performance malaise is to throw hardware at it: Vista performs quite tolerably on state-of-the-art hardware. Unfortunately for Microsoft, so does XP SP3. In fact, it absolutely screams on today's high-end, multi-core desktops and laptops, which puts customers in the position of having to choose between functionality and raw performance.
In conclusion: Don't be confused by all of these headline-grabbing "performance tests." They're focusing almost exclusively on areas that Microsoft tweaked with SP1. The fact remains that Vista will always require roughly 2X the hardware performance to deliver an end-user experience on par with Windows XP.
And when you finally do give in and buy that new "Designed for Vista" PC, do yourself a favor and provision yourself a small XP partition, just as an experiment. Don't settle for Vista until you've seen how much performance you're trading for that shiny new UI and whatever other bells and whistles you find so irresistible. You may be surprise at just how fast your new PC really is - once it's no longer encumbered by the bloat and sluggishness of "Windows 6.x."
