"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

When those functions are "slowness" and "instability" i'd rather they didn't...

Were they clever they'd make XP as bad as Vista, so there was no benefit to not upgrading...

Microsoft said in a statement: "Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

What, you mean I won't get the "New and Improved" file copying, a.k.a. 4 hours to delete 1GB, User Access Control, a.k.a. "we'll secure you against yourself by forbidding you to do anything" and other nice touches?

Superb - I'll download it immediately.

Cloakroom's that way? Great, thanks.

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

It would probably bring significant bugs too if it did.

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

Do we hear a chorus of "Thank <insert deity of choice>, for that"?

Dan

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

Well praise be to his noodly self, seeing as though Vista's (dis)functionality is the reason people are avoiding it like the plague, that's surely another reason to stick with XP?

Suppose SP3 just happened to irretrievably break some parts of some peoples' XP. Incentive enough to 'upgrade' to Vista?

Conspiracy theories are fun (and sometimes hard to easily dismiss).

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

I'm sold. You can keep Vista, M$

Thank heavens for that! Do I want some airy-fairy rotating view of the different windows open? No! Do I want my OS to run as if through treacle on even a highly specced machine? No!

As an aside, do I want to have to use Vista at work - no!

Vista add nothing, and takes away a lot. Even the most powerful of today's computers perform badly on vista compared to xp. Directx 10 adds oh slower games that don't look any different than they do on directx 9. GDI components render upto 3 times slower on vista than they do on XP (which is a major issue for a lot of the CAD software I have to use). Copying files on Vista is just plain ouch.

Im sitting here with a load of office pc's and I cant find one good reason to slap vista on them. Nothing vista brings gives any benefit for the work they do, and in fact will hinder a lot of the tasks they are used for.

My home machines are gaming pc's and I dual boot vista and xp but I find that I don't use vista at all because when I want to game I just play the faster operating system that does everything I want with a lot more efficiency.

I know the vista vs xp subject has been done to death but I'm not seeing a single good reason to switch. Microsoft really has gotten out of touch with what users want and expect and vista just doesn't deliver. The rates its going its going to rank up there with MS BOB and Windows ME.

... + infinite number of keyboards = 9 x same punchline.

Well it was obvious, MS need a "foot in mouth" department to go over press-releases, heh heh heh

and it lasted a whole 38 minutes before I nuked it and put XP back on to play games.

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

The only reason I still have a xp setup is because I cannot be bothered to setup wow under wine or other windows emulators...

I think that Microsoft has just about hit their use by date.

On various "Apple are" topics, the old "paid Microsoft lackeys" was brought up. So, in order to obtain balance.

You are just a bunch of anti-Microsoft schills paid by Apple to bad mouth Microsoft.

The Register is obvious in the hands of the devil Jobs, and is taking bribes to run anti MS storys.

I have an XP machine and it never crashes or gets viruses or.... etc, etc, etc.

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

You say that like it is a BAD thing.

XP used to run just fine with 256MB RAM, now 512MB is barely enough. I do wonder sometimes if the updates MS releases slow your machine to a crawl to make you go out and buy a new one. although some of the blame for this is the bloated "Internet security" suites that in my view are unnecessary for most users behind a decent router.

Maybe I've lived too long in the District of Confusion but:

"does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista"

seems to beg the question of what ARE the "insignificant portions of Windows Vista" that this update introduces?

In case it wasn't stated often enoiugh let me add my voice to the :

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

PRAISE BE TO ALLAH !

I fully endorse this sentiment even though I'm officially an infidel according to

the 'true believers'.

Vista, you will not be missed. Bon Voyage. May your demise be an early one.

May your mustache rot and fall off.

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

Actually, this kind of scares me. With all of the double-speak of legal mumbo, the word "significant" makes me twitch. Sure, they don't bring "significant" portions, but they may still try and squeeze SOME aspects of Vista into SP3. I fear. I think I'll wait for the user reviews before I install it myself.

It's switched off and disconnected, sitting in the back of your shed supporting whatever is piled on top of it?

Like that "random number generator Microsoft is bundling with (Fistula) SP1 with the backdoor exploitable by the National Security Agency?

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/dual_ec_drbg_ad.html

Or more "Digital Consumer Enablement?"

Actually, this is completely backwards. It should be

Review: Windows XP

http://dotnet.org.za/codingsanity/archive/2007/12/14/review-windows-xp.aspx

"I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop..."

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

Well, everybody else was posting that, I just thought I'd join in.

I just don't get what the problem is. MS got slated for years because XP was/is insecure. They rectify that in a new release, but that's somehow a bad thing. Sure UAC asks you to confirm certain things now and again, that's the security you cried for. If I put an extra lock on my front door, it's going to take me marginally longer to get it open than before.

I have been running Vista since release pretty much, and have not noticed any significant stability issues, all of my apps now work fine, but if they didn't, I'd expect the app maker to change them to support the new OS, not the other way round.

Before you start, I'm not some kind of Vista fanboy, I'm a Mac one, and have to say that Leopard doesn't run as well as tiger, crashes more often and the odd app doesn't work 100%. But that seems to be overlooked on Macs as they are the underdog.

I worked for MS in the early XP days, and was party to an awful lot of the activation debacle. I was hearing all the same stuff I'm reading here on a daily basis. People behaving like I had suggested their mother was a prostitute, just because someone had dared to change something. Go install 98, or find a machine at work still running NT 4 and tell me that wasn't a good and (with hiundsight) much needed change, I'm sure that a time will come when exactly the same happens when Vista is replaced, but If I have my way, we'll all be using an open source OS running on Mac hardware by then.

Looks like we're unanimous - Vista is the new ME then.

It's like selling point for XP. LOL Hilarious!

Talk about delusional - the PR drones don't even know what they are doing.

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

Hmm...

I installed Vista Business 32bit on my 6 month old dual core PC at home... and it promptly blue screened following installation. I've been running XP happily with no hint of a blue screen for as long as I can remember - so why Vista should bring back the instabilities that I last saw in Windows 2000\NT4 is beyond me. This is progress?

iv been using Ubunto linux for to months now and theirs no way that im going back to VISTHELL

Doesn't Ubunt*u* come with a spelling/grammer checker?

I remember when XP first came out there were lots of broken applications, dodgy driver support and at the time it was a real resource hog compared to the extremely nippy Win98 and didn't really offer much over Win2K beyond booting more quickly.

So I do wonder if maybe in 3 years time or so we'll all be quite happy with Vista and have forgotten all the problems at the moment. I think the answer could be yes, were it not for the DRM infections which cause file copies/deletions to take forever etc. I do wonder if that is really a step too far and it will push more and more people to XP/OSX/Linux.

It's a bit like the PS3 really, MS have been the market leader for so long, it's hard to tell if the momentum of being the market leader means Vista will succeed despite being crap or if this really is the turning point, especially with so many apps now becoming web based making the OS less and less pivotal.

I've seen a few Vista laptops and desktops since its release, most of which were slow performers to the point that they were almost unusable. Generally they had been sold with 512Mb ram, some sort of dual core processor and inbuilt graphics. Minimum spec, not nice, not clever, not suited to Vista.

Anyway, I recently saw a Vista PC with a E6750 processor, 2GB ram and a NVidia 8600GT 512Mb. Using the onboard graphics, the performance was ok but not good with games, adding the the 8600GT improved performance significantly to make it very usable. The performance index jumped from 3.6 to 5.6 on the Vista performance-o-meter.

Vista needs loads of memory, at decent processor and motherboard, a decent Graphics card and fast disk access, all of these together.

XP needs lower specced hardware to give a comparable performance at a lower cost, theres the rub! As I see it, there are a lot of functioning computers out there that will not run well with Vista even with some changes to the hardware, XP can work well on these machines in most cases or just by adding more memory. I'm speaking about Windows but Linux is another option.

I guess that a year (Two?) down the line, fewer people will complain much about Vista performance as they will be running it on better hardware which will by then be cheaper.

XP does everything I need and it is compatible with all my software that I use for my job and my side company. Why in the world would I want Vista? There are so many bugs in it and with all the "security" I could never get anything done. Not to mention half my software did not work (was told to "update" my software to the tune of about US$1000) and devices did not work (aka "no drivers available" or "the driver will be released in two months").

"Windows XP SP3 does not bring significant portions of Windows Vista functionality to Windows XP."

If it did, I would have to go to Linux for my equipment. I have about as much chance of finding drivers there as in Vista. In fact, I would take Linux over Vista, no problem!!

"When Microsoft discontinues support for XP I have a nagging suspicion that they'll discontinue product activation. You'll be able to continue using XP but come reinstall time, guess what you'll have to install?"

A cracked version of xp? because that will be the option. you use your orginal install disc and key. then you crack the activation, which has been available since the beginning of xp's life-cycle.

Just bought a new laptop last week. It's a Centrino Dual Core with 2 GB RAM. The OS had been "downgraded" to XP with Vista Basic available for activation in a hidden partition.

I booted it with my Fedora 8 DVD and eliminated all existing partitions, formatted the HD to ext3 and 20 minutes later it was running beautifully. Never had a chance to see what XP or Vista would do.

The last version of MSWindows I tried to run was Win98, but it had issues with my hardware and kept blue screening and freezing. RedHat 6.2 fixed those problems and since then computing has been a breeze.