After four years in the making, Windows XP Service Pack 3 is almost ready for release. We've taken an in-depth look at it -- and one aspect of it jumps out as being particularly interesting: the ability to install XP without a serial number.

But first, a little background: Windows XP SP3 was recently released for public beta testing -- “public” being Microsoft Connect and MSDN subscribers. As we’ve already seen, SP3 is really more of a Windows rollup, rather than a massive feature-enhancing package like SP2 was.