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Nov 23 2007

Upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 3 Early!

Posted by: ipp in Technology

Doing the following steps will make Microsofts update servers think you are apart of the Beta Testing group and will allow you to download the update. Please be aware as with any upgrade some applications may break, however I don’t think this will be an issue. Also if you pirated your copy of Windows XP you may want to avoid doing this as it does communicate with Microsoft to get the updates.

How to:

  1. Run the XPSP3.cmd in the zip found here
  2. A popup in the lower right hand corner should come up saying updates are ready, just double click it and follow the instructions it should be pretty straight forward.
  3. If that notifacation doesn’t show up do the following:
    1. Open up Internet Explorer
    2. Go to the Tools dropdown and select Windows Update
    3. If it prompts you to install anything just click install.
    4. Click on Custom and Service Pack 3 should be there!
  4. Once installed reboot and your done!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

6 Responses to “Upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 3 Early!”
  1. kouchikoji says:
    November 23rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm

    what does this do? any new cool features? or just more stable and bug fixes?

  2. kouchikoji says:
    November 23rd, 2007 at 6:27 pm

    also, after i install it, is there anyway to downgrade my machine so that microsoft doesn’t recognize it as a beta tester so i don’t get anymore beta stuff?

  3. Ipp says:
    November 23rd, 2007 at 6:33 pm

    Kochikoji:
    SP3 is mainly just security and bug fixes
    To remove the beta group open up the file you downloaded and remove this line:
    REG ADD “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3″ /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f

    Then run the file again and it should take you out. However this is just Service Pack 3 beta group you shouldn’t get anything other then SP3 related things so it is not exactly needed.

    I do not know if you can uninstall SP3 I havn’t actually upgraded yet, I’m a mac/linux user.

  4. kouchikoji says:
  5. kouchikoji says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 10:26 am

    so i’m still haven’t doen this and i’m wondering “is this the final version, or is this still a beta version?”

  6. Chris says:
    December 4th, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    this is still a beta , it doesn’t work on my computers it just gets stuck in an endless boot cycle loads the windows start screen then reboots, the way i found to go back to SP2 is to tap f8 while your computer is loading and choose safe mode once in safe mode bring up add remove programs in control panel then choose the option to remove microsoft updates then click remove on service pack 3 and that worked for me to get back to service pack 2

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