To install SP3, your computer must meet the hardware and operating system requirements listed below. In addition, your computer must at least be running Windows XP with Service Pack 1 installed.

We recommended that you have Service Pack 2 installed before installing SP3. You can download Service Pack 2 at the Windows XP Service Pack 2 website.

Hardware requirements

To install SP3 on a single computer, your computer must have a CD-ROM drive and at least the following:

A 233 megahertz (MHz) processor
64 megabytes (MB) of RAM
900 MB of available disk space during installation


Operating system requirements

You can use SP3 to update the following operating systems:

Windows XP Home Edition
Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 (Note: If you install SP3 onto a computer running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, your operating system is upgraded to Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005.)


Note: the following operating systems cannot be updated using SP3:

Windows XP Professional x64
Windows XP Embedd