I heard a rumour yesterday that Windows XP service pack 3 (SP3) will be released soon. I haven’t been able to substantiate it yet, but it does sound plausible.

It’s been over a year since SP2 was released and, because it was such a massive update, many organisations still haven’t adopted it because they are worried about the impact that the new security features will have on their infrastructure.

I guess because we’ve heard so little about SP3, when it arrives we can expect it to consist basically of a rollup of hotfixes since SP2, plus SP2 itself; but its arrival will mean is that, based on the Microsoft support lifecycle, SP1 will effectively be out of support. Now’s the time to think seriously about SP2/3 adoption!

For anyone who’s ever struggled to get rid of a Windows component without Windows file protection/system file checker kicking in, I recommend Wes Miller’s post on how to banish Movie Maker from your system. This doesn’t just apply to Movie Maker – you can use the same method to remove any non-critical (or critical for that matter!) component from Windows.

Last year, I posted a blog entry about installing the “Energy Blue” theme on a computer running Windows XP Professional.

Now there’s another option for those who are bored with the standard Windows XP wallpaper, but want something that still looks like part of Windows XP – the “New Bliss” wallpaper from the “Royale” theme, which, like Energy Blue, was originally designed for Windows XP Media Center Edition (XP MCE) 2005 but later ported to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (and is now available for all Windows XP users). This, and some other interesting wallpapers (Kiwi Bliss, Boulders, etc.) are available from Microsoft in New Zealand (I’m not convinced about the Queen’s birthday version though).

(For those who have access, I quite like the Longhorn.jpg wallpaper from Windows Vista Beta 1 too).

I use Windows Notepad a lot and, a few months back, I posted a tip for Send to… Notepad to help people open text files from a context-sensitive right click. Whilst watching me struggle to edit a load of text files with strange file extensions (as he taught me how to use PHP yesterday), Alex came up with another suggestion. It’s probably well known, but if you create a link to Notepad on the Windows quick launch bar (just drag and drop from the start menu), you can drag and drop files onto it and they will open in Notepad. Simple, but very, very useful!

My Windows-based PC just crashed (hardly surprising given all the rubbish I have installed on it recently – despite all of the bad press that Windows attracts, I maintain that a well-patched and well-managed Windows NT, 2000, XP or Server 2003 system will generally be reliable).

In the past, if this has happened, I have ignored the message about error reporting (“yeah, yeah, yada, yada – I need to get back to work and did I manage to save that document I was working on before it crashed?”… etc.) but this time I let it report the problem – and I read the results. It was even useful.

You see what happens, is that if I experience a blue screen crash event, or stop error, while using Microsoft Windows XP (or later), I can upload the error report to the Microsoft Online Crash Analysis (MOCA) site for analysis (Microsoft say this is “to further improve the quality and reliability of Windows”). They then analyse the error report and prioritise it based on the number of customers affected by the error in the report. They then try to determine the cause of the error submitted, categorise it according to the type of issue encountered, and send relevant information when such information is identified.

What I like is that, using MOCA, I can check the status of the error report for 180 days and this time it told me that my system “crashed because the random access memory containing Windows program code was corrupted. Microsoft is unable to determine if this corruption was caused by a hardware or software issue. The nature of the corruption suggests that a hardware issue is more likely. To determine if this is the case, Microsoft developed a Windows memory diagnostic that tests your PC memory. We recommend you download and run this tool on your computer system”.

Sure, so the Windows memory diagnostic tool didn’t find any memory errors so I still don’t know why the PC crashed, but at least it feel like someone actually cares and is trying to fix things… much better than just getting a blue screen of death (or even a red screen of death!).