If you find yourself performing clean installations of Windows XP often, you may want to take the time to build your own installation CD which includes the recently released SP3. This process is called “slipstreaming” and basically creates an install CD which includes SP3 as part of the installation process.

This process is very easy to do and is outlined in detail in this article. The author explains exactly what you will need and how to incorporate SP3 and tweak some settings to create your own installation CD. Again, this will mostly benefit those who do several XP installations, so if you don’t plan on loading another computer, this probably wouldn’t benefit you too much.