Microsoft came out with latest service pack for XP, four years after SP2 was released. XP itself is very stabile system with SP2 installed, so SP3 is considered as not so innovative like it was SP2. The essence of this service pack is to bring all patches for XP that are released until now. Beside patches attended for safety of your OS, SP3 also contains few new additions that should provide better network collaboration, easier administration etc.
Service pack is cumulative so you can install it on XP on which is already installed SP1 or SP2, while for “basic” version of Windows XP that doesn’t have effect. Microsoft recommends installing SP3 on system that already supports SP2. If you decide to integrate SP3 in Windows installation and install Windows with integrated SP3, we should tell you that you can do even that. But, during installation new possibility will wait you: OS installation without need to enter serial number. Also bear in mind recommendation that integration should be done on Windows installation with integrated SP2, but this also can be done with systems with built in SP1. If you install SP3 using Windows update service, you will have to download from Internet from 40MB up to 316, depends how often you upgraded system.

We installed SP3 on Windows that was upgraded on daily bases and that has a lot of installed applications. This was the only way to see if there is any improvement regarding SP2. It takes about 10 minutes on 512Kbps connection for downloading using Windows update service. Also it takes about 15 minutes (which is radically less than it takes for installation SP1 for Vista) for installation SP3 and 900MB on system partition. All settings are left unchanged after SP3 installation except for Spyware Terminator service– it was set on manual start-up, but after SP3 installation it starts automatically. The same thing happened again when we installed SP3 on other computers with Spyware Terminator installed, so it seems that this is “normal”.

You can read the entire article at InsideHW.