Windows XP SP3 is more secure than Windows XP SP2, but significantly less secure than Windows 7. Making the switch to Windows XP SP3 will ensure your systems are still supported by Microsoft–which is good because you might need a lot of support. Of course, like a person living on life support in a hospital, the quality of life of those additional four years is questionable. Microsoft is not scheduled to end all support for Windows XP until April of 2014. Organizations can buy nearly four more years of life support for Windows XP by simply deploying the SP3 update. But not every user reads the MSRC blog.Kandek notes that–even with a significant increase in the rate of migration from SP2 to SP3–“we are still over a year away from having all machines migrated, threatening to leave many machines exposed to exploits for the vulnerabilities that we expect in the second half of 2010.” Microsoft started warning customers of XP SP2’s looming retirement last February, and has been repeating that warning every month in its Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) blog on Patch Tuesday, the regularly-scheduled second-Tuesday-of-the-month security update release day. I don’t think many people were looking at the messages Microsoft was putting out.” “Personally, I didn’t know about it until two months ago. “I think this simply flew under the radar of most IT professionals,” said Kandek, talking about the July retirement of XP SP2. “I expect to see reliable exploits of unpatched vulnerabilities three or four months later.”Ĭompanies have stepped up their efforts to migrate machines to XP SP3 in the last 11 months - the rate of adoption of the newest service pack during that period was roughly double that of SP3’s first 14 months of availability - but even now, just weeks before SP2 will slide off support, half of the Windows XP systems still run the older edition, according to Qualys. “I would expect that come August, SP2 will be getting hard and harder to defend,” said Kandek, referring to the lack of security updates.
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