Can’t wait to try the performance boost that Service Pack 3 brings for Windows XP? Then you can download XP SP1 right now with this little hack.

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Some days ago I blogged about a questionable performance test of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista. The same organizations just tested the performance of Windows XP SP3. The “Researchers” wrote that they measured a “performance boost” of, well, 10%.

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You can now download the service packs for the .NET Framework:

.NET 2.0 SP1 x86
.NET SP1 x64
.NET 3.0 SP1

They were already released two days ago. I find it interesting that almost nobody seems to care about it. I mean, if you compare it with the stir that Vista SP1 has already caused . When Microsoft introduced .NET, I got the impression that in the future the underlying OS won’t play such an important role anymore. It seems that this is not going to happen any time soon.

Once again Paul Thurrott has some interesting information about Windows XP SP3. This is just a short summary for the busy admins among us.

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It is only two months since Microsoft released two performance, compatibility and reliability updates for Windows Vista. Now, there is again a similar update. Some of the improvements were expected to be released with Vista SP1 only. Microsoft seems nervous to me, presumably because of the many complaints and the plunging retail sales.

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Plans for the Windows XP SP3 release are getting a little more concrete now. Mary Joe Foley reports that a beta might be available for MSDN and Technet subscribers by mid September. The final version is still scheduled for H1 2008. I think this SP is not nearly as important as the one for Vista because it supposedly won’t influence OS rollout decisions. The only interesting new feature of XP S3 I know of is the support for NAP (Network Access Protection). I just hope that this service pack is not released too long after Windows Server 2008 because I am keen on introducing NAP in our network.

Everyone has the news. Vista SP1 is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2008; a beta version will be available in September. That is not really an exact release date, but one shouldn’t expect this six months in advance. In this post I summarized the new features of Vista SP1. My summary is based on the white paper about SP1 in the Windows Vista Team blog.

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Paul Thurrott wrote an FAQ about Vista SP1. The most interesting he said is that it will bring a major update to the Windows kernel. Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will then both have the kernel version 6.1.

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Last week I blogged that Vista SP1 beta might be available this week. This information was based on a post of Mary Jo Foley. It seems that her contacts to Microsoft are not as good as I thought. Joe Willcox from Microsoft Watch seems to have other information.

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Mary Jo Foley obviously has good contacts in Microsoft. She already knows that the beta of Vista’s service pack 1 is about to launch in mid-July. Vista SP1 RTM might be released in November 2007. This is certainly much earlier than many have expected.

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Update: Vista SP1 Beta might be released next week.

There have been rumors recently that the release date of Service Pack 1 for Vista might not be too far away. Now, Joe from ITsVista digged up a sentence in a Microsoft statement making it very clear that we won’t see Vista SP1 this year.

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On Tuesday, Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 will be available thru Automatic Update. I recommend waiting to deploy it for some time. Recently, we updated a machine running ISA Server 2004 with SP2. This improved significantly the security of Microsoft’s firewall since all traffic was blocked after the update. Okay, the disadvantage was that the computers behind ISA were not able anymore to access the Internet.

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Since yesterday, Microsoft offers a documentation update for the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). The title of this page at the Microsoft Download Center is: “Windows Automated Installation Kit Documentation (Windows Server code named “Longhorn” & Windows Vista SP1 Beta 3)” It seems I missed Beta 1 and Beta 2 of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, somehow.

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