Following our coverage of the Windows XP SP3 beta leak almost a month ago in August, here’s some more info on the official beta, which just had its first authorized distributable released earlier today. Say hello to Windows XP SP3, build 3205!
While Microsoft’s [[MSFT]] newly-released build and the one leaked a month ago (Build 3180) may share the same name, we can exclusively reveal that they are not identical releases. This release, also shipped as windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe, is 334.2 megabytes and has been made available to tier-one Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 beta testers. Hashes are as follows:
CRC: 56e08837
MD5: c8c24ec004332198c47b9ac2b3d400f7
Along with the standalone installer redistributables (in English, Japanese, and German), Microsoft also provided the usual release notes and a list of all the hotfixes included in this release. Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with all-new features – not just patches and hotfixes, most of them backported from Windows Vista: