All Microsoft wants for Christmas is your download limit. The long-awaited first service pack for Vista -- a whole freakin' gigabyte of it -- is due to arrive early next year, but patch junkies can give themselves an early injection of bug-fixing with a general pre-release of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.
Microsoft has quietly made the release candidate for XP SP3 available on its web site. For the most part, the service pack rolls up previous patches, and only "includes a small number of new functionalities, which do not significantly change customers’ experience with the operating system", according to Microsoft's release notes. (The idea that you can "include functionalities" might change your experience of the English language, of course.)
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