BREAKING NEWS LOL: Service Pack 3 has been leaked ahead of time. Enjoy! Gizmodo links to various download sites. You can also grab it from thepiratebay.org. This post is for fellow XP users waiting for the new service pack. Microsoft has released XP Service Pack 3 to manufacturing (RTM). It will be available to us for download and through Windows Update on April 29th. More info here. NOTE: This is not to be mixed up with the release candidates floating around. Please don't install these because they are not the final version. On a lot of service pack releases, many users have experienced weird issues after installing them on top of pre-existing XP installations. To avoid a lot of these issues, you can slipstream an XP disc with the service pack, then do a fresh install. Slipstreaming is the process of merging a service pack with a Windows disc. There are many guides on how to do this online. This guide shows the process with Service Pack 2. The process shouldn't be too different with Service Pack 3. I hope this information is helpful and that your transition to Service Pack 3 goes well. :)