There’s been no official announcement from Redmond about a possible third service pack for XP, but a software download site claims to have a preview version of XP SP3 available.
A PCWorld article discusses an unofficial preview of the next service pack for Windows XP. The patriotically-named Ethan Allen, who runs The Hotfix software site, has assembled a list of downloadable updates from Microsoft and created a package of those updates.
Mr. Allen has worked with Microsoft on a contract basis as a beta tester for them. He was able to determine the fixes that would be in XP SP2 before that pack was released in August 2004 by searching Microsoft’s web site for certain keywords. “Microsoft makes it freely available about what’s going to be in the next hot fixes, but they hide it,” he said in the article.
Using the same methods and working from a list disclosed to him by an internal source at Microsoft, he has assembled a lengthy list of hotfixes for XP into a preview of Service Pack 3 for XP. While a variety of updates since SP2 are part of the unofficial update, Internet Explorer 7 is not, and reportedly will not be included in an official release of SP3.
PCWorld said that in a chat between beta testers and Microsoft engineers, a program manager for IE notes IE6 would be in SP3, but not IE7. SP3 would “support” IE7, though, and that raises the likelihood of IE7’s release before Vista arrives.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
