FYI: Microsoft has released betas of XP Service Pack 3 and Vista Service Pack 1. Confirmed by the copies my company is now testing our software on. File size of XP SP3 ~ 330MB Aside from the rollup of the previous Hotfixes and Security Updates there is a handful of new functionality items added, but nothing most people would care about. Oh yeah, a special shout-out to XpUser who stated "M$ never have ... and never will .. issue XP SP3 because XP is Vista's biggest competitor" and when I stated that it was scheduled for realeas in the first half of 2008 he responded "Yes it stands for first half but I doubt they will ever issue SP3. Didn't Steve say XP is Vista's biggest competitor? Use your common sense." http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/... Michael J

Well, Steve & Co. eventually got the message after millions of 'downgrades' on Vista machines ... users have been voting with their brains :)

Alright I stand corrected but what I stated last March was my personal opinion based on my reading Ballmer's thoughts. Anyway you can savor all you want on my flawed personal opinion. i_Xp/VistaUser

330GB is pretty big. Will be interesting to see how much of that is for driver and other hardware support. On another note, I am not a big fan of MSoft, however I do understand that at some point they do need to stop supporting an older OS for free. I am a home builder and I do warranty my products. I don't warranty them forever though. I feel just as the music industry needs to change thier business model perhaps this needs to happen with MSoft. With the worldwide installed base of Windows products they could support products beyond a certain point by subscription. The fees wouldn't need to be that much, assumming MS was honest about things. Using your computer is no different than maintaining a car. You need to budget X amount of money per year. At some point in time it gets more expensive to maintain the old car than to buy new. The problem is the OS is currently too large a percentage of the total cost of ownership. If those numbers came down then people would be willing to upgrade more often. Just my two cents.

Been using SP3 pre-release for awhile now, 330mb's in size. No issues with it, much needed bug fixes and improvements in XP. The only real bug I have noticed is not being able to change the font color in the root directories. For some reason the copy I have changes all the font colors to white and you cant read anything unless ya change the folder background to gray. Anyone find a way to fix this and change the font colors in root back to black??? Core2 Duo 1.86 2GB DDR2 667 Nvidia 6800GS Asus P5L-MX

Also can't seem to force 640x480 Res anymore :( 800x600 or higher. Anyone else have the same issue in SP3? Core2 Duo 1.86 2GB DDR2 667 Nvidia 6800GS Asus P5L-MX

I don't have the 640x480 option with SP2.