Like Windows XP over Vista? You're safe a few more years

The internal battle between Windows XP and Windows Vista continued last week with the release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, which will extend the life of the venerable XP for another few years.

The 300-plus megabyte patch, which was released April 29, includes more than 1,000 patches and cumulative updates for XP, which are eagerly awaited by corporate customers because of the ease at which all of the patches can be applied to desktops and laptops. It basically includes all patches and updates released since 2004, plus a few new ones, in one giant update.

This is the last service pack for XP, which Microsoft plans to stop selling in June if all goes according to plan. However, there is a growing outcry from customers to keep XP available after June. Already some PC manufacturers, including HP and Dell, plan to offer a "downgrade" option from Vista to XP for business customers who request it — and many plan to, especially corporate clients, which have been very slow to adopt Vista.

The battle between XP and Vista has been fascinating, actually. The lack of adoption of Windows Vista in the corporate world, mainly because of incompatibilities, lack of drivers for legacy printers and other devices and the need for additional RAM and processing power has put Microsoft in a terrible bind. It has already extended its June 30 deadline for the end of XP once; if it does it again, it tacitly admits the failure of Vista in the enterprise. If it doesn't, it ignores the cries of the installed base of its customers, many of whom at least want the choice of XP when it comes to operating systems.

As for the Service Pack, I have applied it to a half-dozen systems and found it flawlessly installed in about 30 minutes or less, depending on the speed of the processor, the speed of the hard drive and the amount of RAM installed. You can manually download it from Microsoft's Web site or expect it to come from Windows Update automatically in phases over the summer. In many cases you will see a yellow shield near your system clock to alert you that you have the service pack ready to install. Click on the yellow shield to install your updates.

A few great security features are now added and turned on by default, including "Black Hole" router detection and greater authentication compatibility with corporate systems.