After seeing aeriff’s article on Windows XP Service Pack 3 I decided to take a gander at what went in to it. Thankfully Microsoft has a handy .pdf detailing it (with awesome pictures!), scroll down to “Files in this download” and click the download button, because Microsoft is too stupid to make sites where you can link directly to their downloads.

First thing you’ll see when you open up this marvel of a document is the Windows XP Professional logo, complete with not only reflected text, but reflected text in a gradient. How Web 2.0. Too bad they didn’t improve the pixellated logo. It gives you a short abstract of what it contains (not like the title didn’t already do that!), and then you move on to the next page.

You could read the whole legal blurb and let your mind melt at the words within it, but I’d recommend skipping this.

Oh look, an index! A whole 10 pages!

And now we get to the Introduction. The introduction explains how Microsoft so awesomely works incredibly hard to improve their operating system (and I don’t doubt they do). You can read how apparently awesome Microsoft is (and I don’t doubt they aren’t… in their own minds), or you can direct your gaze over to the awesome funnel on the right hand side. Here we have three spheres, done up in what appears to be Fireworks or Photoshop, coloured purple, green and red and complete with stroke, inner shadow (actually, it’s bevel & emboss) and drop shadow. Then we have the piece de resistance, the funnel itself. A very light blue with a thick darker blue stroke and an even thicker (but less opaque) black outer glow. What a work of art! Let’s not forget the arrow, which is quite obviously bevelled and embossed, pointing to the large text Service Pack. Finally, to make the whole diagram look almost 3d there’s a very fainy shadow for the funnel, beginning at the base of the funnel to the top of the “Service Pack” text. This should be hanging in the Louvre.

On the next page we are not blessed with such fantastic artwork as the Funnel of Updates, but instead we’re given another huge block of text. It mentions that it does not upgrade it to Vista (duh, that would not cost the consumer money), and does not include IE7, which I found interesting since I believe this was initially released through the automatic updating process. Perhaps Microsoft actually listened to the Mozilla Foundation/Opera/elinks? It links you to a knowledge base article #936929.

The next few pages lists what’s been introduced into Windows XP through updates. WPA2 is something that caught my eye, and absolutely everything else on this first page seemed to be wankery.’

The next page I wanted to look at was page 8, with the huge dialog box open showing how well the Administrator account local security settings is now documented, which it probably should’ve been before the OS was released. Now anyone playing around with this option should either 1) know the consequences if they mess it up and 2) know what they want to know… making this document irrelevant. And it even links you to an on-site address, purportedly giving you more information about the setting.

You don’t have to provide a product key when upgrading, but it will install the “Genuine Advantage” tool, by the look of things.

Won’t be something I’m installing any time soon, I’m running Ubuntu :)