Microsoft has quietly issued Windows XP SP3 as a release candidate preview to about 15,000 selected testers. Already, testers are claiming that Microsoft's Office suite runs 10 percent faster on XP SP3 compared to XP SP2. This comes as a surprise, as XP SP3 was planned mainly as a "bug fix and patch consolidation" release. Hence the reported speed boost has naturally come as a welcome surprise to XP users and yet another incentive not to upgrade to Vista for those leery about taking the jump. Whatever the case, SP3 is slated for release sometime in the first half of 2008 and will be the last major update to the venerable six-year-old operating system. It will include more than 1,000 hot fixes and patches that have been issued over the past three years. At least four new features will also be included, some of them ports of Vista tools. According to Microsoft, the target for the release of the XP SP3 RTM would be somewhere in the first half of 2008.