Try Out The Release Candidate of SP3

By Jeffrey | November 27, 2007

Note: I do not take any responsibility for any consequences that occur as a result of this guide. The download is direct from Microsoft, so it should be completely safe. Also, it is a Release Candidate, so it should be fairly stable. But I can’t be held responsible if anything goes wrong.

The official release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has been delayed until sometime in 2008, but there is no reason that you can’t try out the Release Candidate version for yourself.

The version is available directly from Windows Update for beta users. Unfortunately, the chances are that most people are not beta users, and so they don’t have access to the service pack.

Well, we can fix that.

It’s quite simple, too.

Microsoft just provided instructions on adding some keys to the registry in order for Windows Update to give access to the update, so here’s what you need to do to add those same keys.

Open up Notepad, and copy these lines into a new file:

@echo off
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
echo XPSP3 registry key has been set.  Please check for updates in Windows Update.
pause

then save it as a .cmd file - NOT a .txt file - with whatever name you so choose.

Alternately, you can download the file I’ve created here. (Right-click and Save As)

Run the .cmd file, and close the command prompt window when it’s done.

Now load up Windows Update, check for available updates, and voilà: the Release Candidate of SP3 is available for download!

Topics: Guides |