An article written by Richard Koman from newsfactor.com talks about the performance increases that everyone will see once SP3 for Windows XP is released. The company Devil Mountain Software, has recently done tests on Windows Vista in regards to the up-coming release of SP1. The testing concluded:
“The hoped-for performance fixes that Microsoft has been hinting at never materialized,” the testers reported. “Vista + SP1 is no faster” than out-of-the-box Vista, they said.
“If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista to date, get used to it. SP1 is simply not the panacea that many predicted. In the end, it’s Vista’s architecture — not a lack of tuning or bug fixes — that makes it perform so poorly on systems that were ‘barn-burners’ under Windows XP,” the research staff said.
This isn’t the only testing Devil Mountain Software has done, they have also tested SP3 for Windows XP. And have found that there is a 10% performance boost when running their Office Productivity Test Suite:
Running an Office productivity test suite on a preview version of Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, Devil Mountain discovered a 10 percent performance boost over the current version of Windows XP, the company reported on its blog.
In comparable tests of Office tasks, Vista and Vista plus SP1 took approximately 90 seconds to complete the suite, while XP took only about 40 seconds and XP plus SP3 ran about four seconds more quickly than that.
The article concludes that the biggest threat to Vista is Microsofts own OS Windows XP. Personally my preference has always been XP as I would rather be able to complete tasks quickly rather than slowly with lots of nice effects.
