Windows XP SP3 Boosts Performance 10 Percent

On the heels of last week's news that Windows Vista's first service pack would do nothing to improve performance comes some good news for those who wisely chose not to upgrade the new OS: XP's upcoming Service Pack 3 (now in limited beta) does improve performance, in the range of 10 percent, a substantial boost.

Exo.blog has the benchmarks again.

The results are initially somewhat surprising, as Exo notes, since SP3 is largely meant as a bug fix rollup for a mature OS and shouldn't carry with it any architectural changes serious enough to shave that much slowness off of the OS's operation. But on further reflection, it's important to remember how small changes can have major impacts on OS performance. Tweaking the way and the frequency with which memory is paged to the hard disk, for example, can have major ramifications for computer speed. The hope is that none of this has any negative effect on system stability. (And so far, things are looking up in that department too.)

Want to see something really scary? Check out how slow Vista is compared to XP on the same tasks now. (Vista is the leftmost two bars on the graph above.) 

Latest word on XP SP3 is that it is still planned for release in the first half of 2008. If you want a (legal) preview of what SP3 will look like when it comes out, you might check out TheHotfix.net, which offers a "preview pack" release that's likely to emulate what SP3 is like.

LINK: Windows XP SP3 Yields Performance Gains