Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 has exited its beta phase and entered Release Candidate phase. As usual, it is now available for download publicly. This Release Candidate is build 3264.

"While Windows Vista provides the most advanced security and management capabilities of any Windows operating system, Windows XP SP3 will ensure PCs running Windows XP will have the latest updates, as well as compatibility with the Network Access Protection functionality of Windows Server 2008," Microsoft said in a statement.

The new Service Pack 3 for Microsoft's previous operating system will feature more than 1,000 hot fixes and patches that have been issued in the past three years, as well as at least four new features, some of which will be ports of Vista tools.

Previous builds of the software update had previously been available only to participants in Microsoft's official test program, but now it's readily available to the public here.

Last month, testers over at Devil Mountain Software have analyzed the performance of Windows XP Service Pack 3 build 3244 and found that "testing with OfficeBench showed an ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP w/Service Pack 2."

Windows XP Service Pack 3 build 3244 was also twice as fast as Windows Vista in the OfficeBench benchmark program. They used a Dell XPS M1710 laptop with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM and nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video, running Microsoft Office 2007.

The final version of Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 is expected sometime early next year.