The first testing reports are in: Windows Vista's Service Pack 1 is unlikely to offer any improvement in performance, one of users' biggest complaints about the new OS, over the version of Vista you have already.

Benchmarks were performed by exo.performance.network under a variety of scenarios, using the latest beta of SP1 (which was recently made available to a wide assortment of testers). The results are largely unimpressive: With general productivity applications Vista SP1 showed a slight (2 percent) performance drop vs. out-of-the-box Vista or a statistically insignificant difference. The results were about the same for database applications, too (see chart above): SP1 offers no improvement, but it doesn't really hurt, either.

Though it's not the speed boon we'd been hoping for, it's important to remember that Windows Service Packs rarely improve performance at all. In fact, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 was released, most systems saw a substantial performance drop (my tests at the time pegged it at an average of 9 percent). But SP2's many improvements to OS stability and added features like the Windows Firewall easily made it a must-have addition. That's the same hope here, that while Vista SP1 may not make your computer scream (the study authors note that it is Vista's architecture that makes it so slow, and no amount of fine-tuning is going to fix that), at least it might remedy some of the (numerous) other annoyances about Vista.

LINK: Vista SP1 a Performance Dud