Word has just reached us that the long awaited Service Pack 3 for Windows XP has been made available for download by Microsoft to Beta Testers.

Coming in at 1,037.24MB this will make it one of the largest Service Packs that Microsoft has ever released. The size of Service Pack 3 will most likely present some problems for IT organizations that may find it time consuming and very difficult to deploy a Service Pack of this size.

The biggest goal of Service Pack 3 will to incorporate the vast amount of patches and security updates that have been released since Service Pack 2. These days a fresh XP Service Pack 2 install can take as much as 250MB and three reboots to download all of the patches and security updates necessary to fully patch and update a system.

Microsoft continues to say that the focus of Service Pack 3 will be about patches, bug fixes, security updates, and not about new features. With the release to Beta Testers we can only assume that Service Pack 3 for XP is still on track to be released during the first quarter of 2008 as Microsoft has indicated. Service Pack 1 for Vista is scheduled to ship before the end of the year and is currently in testing.