According to Tech ARP, Windows XP SP3 is due for release on April 21st, which will be a manual download - probably released to the Microsoft Technet subscribers first. A week later it will be available for manual download by anyone. As regular readers will know I’ve been testing the service pack when in it’s earlier stages and have found it to be very stable - although the speed increases that people were quoting have not been seen. I think it’s just an evolution of the OS that brings everything up to date in a nice easy package - with a few security changes thrown in as well. Read the two reports here and here.