XP SP3 To Offer Performance Gains

By Greg McNevin

November 27, 2007: Early test results from Windows XP Service Pack 3 indicate that Windows Vista may be about to lose just a little bit more of its “wow”, with the upcoming release showing a 10% boost in performance over SP2.

Conducted by Devil Mountain Software, the independent tests show that on machines with identical hardware configurations SP3 is most certainly more agile than SP2, taking somewhat more shine off Microsoft’s case to upgrade to Vista.

“After a disappointing showing by Windows Vista SP1, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP Service Pack 3 (v.3244) delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS. Testing with OfficeBench showed an ~10% performance boost vs. the same configuration running under Windows XP w/Service Pack 2,” writes Craig Barth, Devil Mountain Software’s chief technology officer on the firm’s EXO Blog.

The performance boost has come somewhat unexpectedly too, as SP3 was intended as more of a bug-fix release than anything else. Testing was carried out on identical Dell XPS M1710’s, with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPUs, 1GB of RAM and nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video, and Barth notes that “none of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than 2x slower than the most current builds of its older sibling”

While the news is hardly likely to scuttle Vista, with SP3 bring a host of bugfixes and now performance increases to the table, many firms may be tempted to bear with the now six year-old operating system until Microsoft’s next release.

“XP SP3 is shaping-up to be a "must have" update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond's not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS,” writes Barth.

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