As Microsoft are trying to still push the world onto Vista, most of use continue to use Windows XP. I hadn’t really heard much about it, but XP service pack 3 is now at the release candidate stage. You can download it and read more about it here

As you’d expect, it’s not got very much new functionality (you need vista for that). It seams mainly to be a roll up of all the fixes since SP2, there are however a couple of new bits that might be useful in the enterprise:

• Black Hole Router detection (routers that are silently dropping packets)
• Network Access protection (NAP) support (quite a cool idea, never heard of it before)
• Ability to run a Windows install without entering the product key. It will prompt later as part of the genuine advantage stuff (you would have to be installing of an image with SP3 on it to do this)

I’ve not downloaded it yet, so I don’t know personally how well it works, but if you have a look on http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-re-testing-vista-w2gb-ram-office.html there is a suggestion that it might actually make things run a bit faster, but ill believe this when I see it.

If you are not part of the Microsoft universe, on Friday (the 11th) there is a new version of the KDE desktop manager being released. It will be version 4 and has some cool new features, check out http://www.kde.org/ for more info.