A public beta of the third service pack for Windows XP is currently cooking over at Microsoft. The Redmond company confirmed officially that Windows XP Service Pack 3 Beta is heading towards a stage where all Windows XP users would be ermined access to a development milestone of the refresh. Initial reports pointed to public availability concomitantly with the move from the beta stage to that of release candidate for the service pack. An RC label would certainly recommend XP SP3 for testing by a much wider audience, even if the version that will be opened to the public will still carry the pre-RC, Beta tag.

Of course, this is all but speculation at this time. At the end of the past week, David Sebban, a Consultant with Microsoft France revealed that Windows XP SP3 Beta had went live. And Microsoft soon after confirmed that it had opened the beta program for Windows XP SP3 to all those included in the testing of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 Release Candidate 0. In this context, some 12,000 Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 testers can also access XP SP3 Beta. Of course that this is not the actual fully-fledged beta version of XP SP3, as testers found, but the same version dropped in mid July, simultaneously with Windows Vista SP1 pre-beta.

While it has focused on the Beta for Vista SP1 and on the RC for Windows Server 2008, Microsoft overlooked to advance the Windows XP SP3 Beta Preview. But, at the same time, Sebban promised that a public beta of Windows XP SP3 would be made available "soon." And the promise of such a release was reiterated by a comment from the Windows Client team via a Microsoft representative as cited by Mary Jo Foley.

"Regarding XP SP3, it was made available to about 12,000 private beta testers [on October 4]. We decided to release a private beta first to select testers, which happened last week. We are still planning on a public beta, which should be available in the future, but we have no more information to share today", the Microsoft representative stated.

At this point in time, the Redmond company failed to deliver any additional details related to the availability of Windows XP SP3 public beta. The final version of the refresh is planned for the first half of 2008, after the release of Windows Vista SP1. Moreover, there's still no word on when TechNet and MSDN subscribers will be permitted access to XP SP3 beta.