Windows XP SP2

If you are anyone like me, you'd want to be the first to try out Windwos XP Service Pack 2. It's still in the Technical Preview RC2 stage, but it feels so good to have it installed anyway.

Some of the first things I've noticed:

• It has Windows Firewall enabled by default. So when an application tries to open up ports, it gives the following screen allowing us to allow or block the operation.

• When opening a suspicious attachment in my Outlook, it gave me this security dialog:

• There's a new fancy Security Center in ControlPanel, which allows you to take care of all security related stuff in one place, enabling Virus protection, Firewall, Automatic Updates, etc.
• IE has a built-in Popup blocker, and it displays a cool yellow Information bar right on top when it blocks popups, and you can click it to enable the popups.


• IE no longer has the Media Bar. Thank god, I never seem to have had any use of that anyway.


• Add/Remove Programs now groups all the Windows Update hotfixes together. Earlier I really had more entries of hotfixes than actual applications installed in my machine. (sick!)

There are other minor changes, here's a good review with screenshots.