Windows XP Service Pack 3 Trounces Vista In Speed Tests
Cue the OS flamewar theme song — there’s more potential fuel for the Vista hating fires in a recent set of speed tests. Although neither is available to the public yet, earlier reports suggest that upcoming service pack releases for XP and Vista have an unintended result — they make XP “considerably faster” than the much touted Vista.
First the good news. The third service pack for Windows XP, slated to arrive early next year, reportedly gives the venerable OS a near 10 percent performance boost. Those numbers come from Devil Mountain Software which put XP SP2 through a battery of benchmark tests and then did the same to XP using the SP3 beta which was recently handed out to testers.
Although the benchmark tests focused on Microsoft Office, they back up informal reports on blogs and social news sites where a number of people have reported that SP3 gives XP a speed boost. So far Microsoft has only publicly said that SP3 will address bugs and fix security flaws, so the performance gains, if true, would be an unexpected bonus for XP users.
The bad news, from Microsoft’s perspective, is that running the same tests on Vista SP1 shows that the much touted speed improvements in Vista may turn out to be largely insignificant. That would add more fuel to the fire for those already unhappy with Microsoft’s latest operating system.
There’s a few things to bear in mind about these benchmarks. First off neither service pack is an official release and thus may not be fully optmized yet. Also interesting is group’s test machine — a 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM. It’s worth noting that XP SP2 was not originally optimized for dual core chips. I haven’t been able to find anything suggesting that SP3 is either, but if it is, it would at least partly explain the significant speed improvements over SP2.
The other thing worth noting is that the test really only compares performance in Microsoft Office. Now if you have to pick something common to most users Office is a good bet, but it isn’t the final word. For instance, there’s no guarantee that these benchmarks will mean Halo is going to perform better on XP SP3 than SP2.
Since we haven’t tested either service pack ourselves, we won’t make any judgments, but with Vista already having a hard time marking inroads against XP, particularly with business users, if the lackluster performance ends up being the final word it could be another nail in the Vista coffin.
[via Slashdot where the XP/Vista flamewar is just starting to ignite]
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