Microsoft rolled out a test version of Service Pack 3 for XP last week. The results are very positive with the largest being a 10% performance boost, meaning the service pack will enhance system performance.

The good news is that when XP SP3 is rolled out, you can say "Hey! Cool! Free upgrade!"

So what’s the bad news?

It means this is yet another reason for XP users not to switch to Vista and more or less avoid it altogether until Windows 7 is rolled out in 2010 (estimated).