Windows 7 might be getting all the attention lately, but Windows XP is having a quiet little renaissance of its own — not only have sales of the venerable OS been extended until 2010, Microsoft is selling an ultra-secure version to the Air Force. The custom build ships with over 600 settings bolted down, and a security patch turnaround of just 72 hours compared to the standard edition’s 57 days — all because Steve Ballmer personally stepped in and approved the project at the Air Force’s request. The effort’s to standardize and preconfigure the OS has paid off: 85 percent of previous known exploits have been blocked, support call volume has dropped 40 percent, and the USAF has saved some $100 million in costs. Nice — but don’t get your hopes up, since it doesn’t seem like Microsoft has any intention of selling this version to the public.

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Whether or not Windows 7 does launch in October as previously suggested, those who have (or plan to get) Release Candidate will be happy to hear that Microsoft won’t be pulling the plug until June 1, 2010, well over a year from now and 11 months after its initial expiration date. After that, you’re gonna have to fork over the Benjamins for one of the retail SKUs if you wanna keep 7 alive. As for those still living in Redmond’s past, the company’s also extended the life of XP, at least for OEMs. Companies using the older OS will still be able to install it on netbooks for up to one year after 7′s official shape date. Seeing as the new system’s likely to have a more expensive licensing fee, it’s probably the best move if the company plans on keeping that 96% grip on the netbook OS market.

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Finally Microsoft has released SP3 for your Windows Xp and this time just run your windows update
to get this sp3 update which promises speed boost and various other security features found in Vista.

If you’re a Vista user you’re also in luck, since Microsoft has restarted its Vista SP1 distribution after some compatibility problems with Microsoft Dynamics RMS.

ok ppl after a 3hrs wait i downloaded the windows xp sp3 rc (336mb) n very quickly i installed it…
bt after the restart to my surprise my flyakite osx theme ws gone… bt the transformation pack traces were still visible… after some googling i realized dt it ws sp3′s uxtheme.dll that ws responsible.. so i removed osx transformation pack n downloaded the vista transformation pack 8.01 which ac. to users is compatible with xp-sp3 but evrytime i started the installation setup crashed.. ds ws due to intel graphics driver so i uninstalled it n installed a standby dell graphics driver i got from net n then i installed vtp 8.01 bt still same problem transformation done but no vista theme.. problem:-uxtheme.dll not supported on this os… then after some more search i got a soln.. i downloaded the patched uxtheme.dll file for my version of xp-sp3 release candidate n now hw to use it manually.. first rename uxtheme.backup in system32 to _uxtheme.backup dn rename uxtheme.dll to _uxtheme.dll n nowpaste the patched uxtheme.dll in this folder n yehhh… vista visual themes are back….
so now i hv vtp 8.01 on my xp-sp3 rc….