Perhaps as a last hurrah to XP or maybe even a bitter acknowledgement of the demand for the OS, Microsoft is releasing XP’s Service Pack 3 in April.

TechARP broke the news on SP3’s release, giving details on dates and language versions. Despite Microsoft’s history of killing past versions to usher in the new, the bad press dogging Vista since its release gave Microsoft little choice but to extend their support time for XP. January 31st 2009 will be D-Day for XP’s OEM availability, after much lobbying by systems builders.

The Service Pack will of course be basically a bugfix and updates bundle. Besides the usual hole-sealing and security issue resolving, an expanded set of product keys for Windows XP Professional will also be included,  aset originally introduced in Windows XP SP2c.

Windows Media Center Edition or XP Table Edition users might be disappointed to find out that neither version will be released with SP3 as a CD, meaning they must rely on Windows Update.

Expect the releases to come in two waves – the first will be in the second half of April 2008 for the following language versions – Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish.

The next release (estimated in about 21 days after the first wave) will be for these languages – Arabic, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.

Besides Windows XP Media Center and Tablet Editions, the other flavours of XP will have both standalone and integrated formats for XP3, in CD and DVD format. Only the Japanese version will come exclusively on DVD.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 12:05 pm under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Erna Mahyuni.
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