A technical preview or in other words, a Beta of the much awaited SP2(Service Pack 2) of WindowsXP has been released & is available at Microsoft website at www.microsoft.com/sp2preview/ & its a fair sized download, about 270MB. š
The final release is expected around November this year, so this Beta can be expected to have quite a number of bugs. š
SP2 detects Norton Antivirus if its installed & does automatic virus updates. But 2 good improvements that Microsoft has brought about in SP2 are, an improved firewall(that was just a basic firewall until now) & due to popular demand, a pop-up blocker in IE. š
The firewall is now turned on by default & lets you choose which programs should be allowed access to Internet which should be restricted. It pops up a box whenever a program attempts to access Internet but this feature is still quite buggy, allowing Opera to access Internet without any notification. šæ
So, anyone who wants to try the new features, go ahead & try it out but be warned:
This is Beta Release & may contain bugs, so its not recommended for use in production environment.