News from Winbeta.org that Microsoft has sent some early copies of XP Service Pack 3 out for testing. So far it seems that there are only bug fixes included rather than the goodies we have become accustomed to with SP1 and SP2 including Windows Movie Maker and the Firewall.

The worrying thought there is whether these goodies are actually an essential bait to get people to upgrade. I've been picking up a worrying trend on our forums of people who won't update Windows on principle.

Please, please resist this temptation and turn Automatic Updates on. I'll compromise on one thing. I set Automatic Updates to download automatically but then prompt me to install the updates. This gives me a chance to review the updates in case there is anything that has been known to cause problems.