Microsoft may not have officially released their latest service pack for Windows XP yet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it.
If you want to try out SP3, you can add the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3
then create a string valued named RCPreview and give it the value 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869. You can then go to the Windows update site where you will find SP3 listed as an availible update!
If you don’t like editing the registry, you can create a batch file to do it for you. Just copy the following into Notepad or Wordpad, then save it as SP3.bat
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /f 2> NUL
reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\XPSP3 /v RCPreview /t REG_SZ /d 1c667073-b87f-4f52-a479-98c85711d869 /f
Double click the new .bat file and the registry changes will be made for you.