WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 3 MAY be the end for XP service packs, as Microsoft's mainstream support for the OS ends in 2009. SP3, whose release date hadn't been announced at press time) is mostly an aggregation of the fixes and upgrades Microsoft has released since SP2, although there are a few brand-new security additions that make upgrading worthwhile. Numerous pieces ofSP3 have already been available as downloads and hot fixes. These include sup¬port for Wi-Fi Protected Access Version 2 (WPA2), as well as Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Management Console, Version 3.1 of Windows Installer, and the Digital Identity Management Service.

One of the most noteworthy SP3 components is Internet Explorer 7.0. Now more than a year old, IE7 replaces the aged-to-decrepitude IE6, adding tabbed browsing, an RSS reader, and reasonable security. Windows Media Player 11 is another big plus. Available since spring 2006, WMPll is a tremendous improvement over previous versions, acting as a repository and player for all your music, video, and images; it also integrates storefronts for numerous media vendors.

The biggest piece of XP SP2 was a massive security rethink; SP3 offers a few more tweaks. If you look hard enough, you'll see new and clearer descriptions of some settings in the Control Panel Security Options applet, which help users configure system security correctly. Other security improvements are aimed at developers, such as support for FIPS 140-1 Levell cryptography as a DLL at the kernel level. This lets developers make use of crypto¬graphic algorithms to improve driver security.

One improvement introduces a rare relaxation of security: As with Vista, you no longer need to provide the product key during installation, which should make the process easier. If you don't provide the key, however, you'll be prompted for it later as part of the Windows Genuine Advantage check. Finally, networking gets some attention. First, there's improved black-hole router detection: XP's newly improved sensing of routers dropping certain kinds of packets allows it to reconfigure the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to keep connections alive without the performance compromise that detection formerly caused.

SP3 also lets network admins use network access protection to establish policies ensuring that each attached XP machine has a high-enough health level-in other words, is secure enough-to access the network. Keen eyes may have noticed that many new features in SP3 actually come from Vista (and associated OSs such as Windows Server 2008). It's possible that Microsoft will continue to backport features from Vista, especially since XP threatens to hang around for a while.