Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Service Pack 3 Speeds XP

Microsoft has released the beta version of Windows XP to a limited number of testers just days after Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released. Testers say SP3 speeds up Windows XP.



Service Pack 3 Boosts XP's Speed
Looks like the six-year old operating system is improving, as early testers of Windows XP SP3 reveals that it speeds up Windows XP. Microsoft has released the beta version of SP3 to a limited number of tester just days after the release of SP1 for Vista.

Devil Mountain Software tested the SP1 for Vista earlier, and claimed that Vista with SP1 is no faster than the original, unpatched version. They repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3.

"We were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP SP3 delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS," said Craig Barth, Devil Mountain's chief technology officer, in a post to a company blog Friday.

Devil Mountain ran its OfficeBench suite of performance benchmarks on a laptop equipped with Office 2007, Microsoft's latest application suite. The notebook - the same unit used in the Vista/Vista SP1 tests earlier - featured a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory. The results reported a 10% speed increase under XP SP3 when compared to SP2, the service pack released in 2004.

"Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release, the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus," Barth said. "In fact, 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."

According to the Office performance benchmarks, Windows XP SP3 is also considerably faster than Vista SP1. "None of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than two times slower than the most current builds of its older sibling," said Barth.

This may be the Service Pack that could snatch away Vista's selling points. Since companies are still reluctant to upgrade to Vista, they may test out this service pack and eventually skip Windows Vista altogether if all goes well. For one thing, upgrading to Windows Vista costs money - to purchase the operating system, to upgrade the computer components to match the requirements of Vista, and to train people on how to use the new operating system. Upgrading Windows XP to Service Pack 3, is free, however. In addition, XPs performance is better than Vista, considering the application incompatibilities, and with this upgrade, it looks like XPs the clear winner.

But we can't tell for sure. Even though Microsoft extended the support for the six-year old operating system, they may come up with some scheme to force Windows XP users to upgrade to Vista.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is scheduled to be released in the early quarter of 2008, but Microsoft said this lock is not definite, but will respond accordingly to consumer demands.

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