Windows XP is all around us, what a lot of people don’t know is that Windows XP is even installed on ATM’s. I remember the old ATM I used to use in Woolworths which used to Blue Screen but it’s not only ATM’s that use Windows XP, the self-checkout tills in Tesco and Asda are running as well.

For any users who currently use the old Service Packs of Windows XP it’s essential that you upgrade your copy of Windows XP Home, Professional, Media Centre Edition or Tablet Edition before 13^th July 2010 or you won’t receive any help from Microsoft as they are stopping support making Microsoft’s Service Pack 1 and 2 a ‘legacy’ software.

So if you are on Service Pack 2, you can upgrade through Windows Update which is under ‘All Programs’ accessible through your ‘Start’ button at the bottom left of your screen. However, if you are on Service Pack 1, it’s not as easy to go straight to Service Pack 3. You firstly need to go to Service Pack 2 and then upgrade to 3.

Service Pack 3 was released as an upgrade to existing computers running SP2 on 29^th April 2008 (quite a while ago in computer terms) with more security updates and newer features compared to its predecessors. Microsoft didn’t necessarily aim their update to consumers but to businesses that are deploying computers.

Service Pack 3 contains three new areas not in the previous versions:

Networking

• Network Access Protection (NAP) modules and policies have been migrated from Vista. NAP is more of a corporate update
• New updates and patches making it more stable and secure
• Improvement to black hole router detection, for people who don’t know what a black hole router is one that discards packets of data silently.

Security

• A new kernel that provides access to cryptographic algorithms
• To aid users into not selecting the incorrect security settings, Microsoft have made the Control Panel more descriptive.

Miscellaneous

• A new Windows Product activation that doesn’t require users to input a product key during setup
• Can detect routers discarding data
• HD audio support which is going to be beneficial for gamers

To upgrade to Service Pack 3, it’s an easy process to upgrade, just simply go to ‘Start > All Programs > Windows Update’. Once forwarded to the Internet Explorer page, just select ‘Express (Recommended)’ and Windows will do all the updates for you. You will however have to make sure that any current programs are closed, shut, saved and preferably backed up to an external hard drive or another peripheral as your computer will have to restart towards the end of the update.

If you need more information on updating to Service Pack 3, please click here.

I’m pretty sure Microsoft would empty their last Post Office savings account to ensure Windows 7 is a hit – and if they fulfil the promise shown by the beta version I have been testing for the past few days, then 7 could be their greatest operating system yet.

XP, Vista, 7

There are still people out there who slate Vista however my experience has been I found it a welcome upgrade from XP and whilst it does have its flaws it is a much more stable OS than even XP with SP2. (People conveniently forget the nightmare that XP was on 1^st release)

With my Vista experience in mind,  I have been pleased to discover over the past few days that Microsoft appears to have built on Vista’s strengths and addressed most of its weaknesses with the beta release of Windows 7.

Installing

The Windows 7 install was totally painless. The built in driver support covered all the hardware aspects of my test machine (self-build Intel P4 Dual with 2Gb RAM). 30 minutes of installing, a few reboots and I was up and running.

Performance

I had heard that 7 was significantly faster than Vista and sure enough it seemed to be the case. I installed Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Office 2007 and Call Of Duty. All installed perfectly and I found I could easily launch PhotoShop and Dreamweaver – whilst surfing the web.

So whats new?

Vista’s most visible annoyance, User Account Control (those annoying pop-ups that warn you every time you do anything), is set by default at a much less ferocious level, and I encountered it only a couple of times throughout a whole morning of installing applications. It can of course easily be changed back via Windows 7′s new Action Center, which acts as a central place for security updates and warning alerts.

Post-install Windows 7 recommended that I installed a 3^rd party Anti-Virus package. The suggested options were AVG and Kaspersky however the operating system itself comes preinstalled with Windows Defender.

One cool thing I found was the new photo-realistic device icons. They look much classier and will no-doubt raise comments from Mac fan-boys. Microsoft appears to have wiped out a lot of the Windows XP-era interface quirks of Vista; the result is a much more simplistic, unified experience for common tasks.

To wrap up…

Overall so far I’ve found 7 to be a stable and useable OS. Critics will complain that in essence it’s a tarted up Vista but why is that so bad? It is important to note that I haven’t tested the beta version of 7 extensively, merely started to play around with it, but so far – so good.

Oh yes sorry – I did have a problem. Apple’s iTunes refused to install….. J